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Trouble installing W2K on Thinkpad 390X

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TheTyttuutface
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Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2018 3:19 pm
Location: Cincinnati, OH

Trouble installing W2K on Thinkpad 390X

#1 Post by TheTyttuutface » Sat Nov 17, 2018 8:49 pm

I've been working on restoring the Thinkpad 390X my mom used when I was a baby. The hardware side of things has gone OK (except for lots of brittle plastic bits cracking), but now that I'm trying to install Windows 2000 on it, I'm pretty stuck.

I've burned two Windows 2000 install CDs (plus a third I have yet to try), and neither of them have worked. Both throw an error: "Boot record signature AA55 not found (0000 found)". I tried installing from two USB drives through Plop Boot Manager on a floppy, one loaded with Yumi and one with WinSetupFromUSB, but neither have worked. USB support seems a little flaky.

I also tried installing Windows on a VM with the laptop's hard drive used as the installation volume, and that didn't work. I also tried copying the files from an actual virtual hard disk with W2K onto the drive (just for the hell of it), and it didn't work. Both times, it said "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart," even with no floppy, CD, or any other media connected.

I have the old 20GB hard drive with Windows 2000 on it, and as far as I know it works OK. I also have a period-correct 12GB drive I'd prefer to use. The installation on the old drive is far from clean, so would there be any way to copy that to the new drive and somehow "clean" it?

The laptop has a 500MHz Pentium III and 64MB of RAM (which I want to upgrade eventually).

Screamer
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Re: Trouble installing W2K on Thinkpad 390X

#2 Post by Screamer » Sun Nov 18, 2018 3:00 am

I have a question, what were those Windows 2000 installation CDs, specifically? Were they installation CDs with no service packs integrated?

The boot record error message sounds rather ancient, and I believe that message indicates a partitioning problem. I am not very sure on that, though. Did you have any existing partitions on the HDD that you tried to install on?

As far as I know, no. I doubt there is such a way of grabbing that old installation and then 'cleaning' it.

TheTyttuutface
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2018 3:19 pm
Location: Cincinnati, OH

Re: Trouble installing W2K on Thinkpad 390X

#3 Post by TheTyttuutface » Sun Nov 18, 2018 10:38 am

Screamer wrote:
Sun Nov 18, 2018 3:00 am
I have a question, what were those Windows 2000 installation CDs, specifically? Were they installation CDs with no service packs integrated?

The boot record error message sounds rather ancient, and I believe that message indicates a partitioning problem. I am not very sure on that, though. Did you have any existing partitions on the HDD that you tried to install on?

As far as I know, no. I doubt there is such a way of grabbing that old installation and then 'cleaning' it.
I had one empty FAT32 partition.

I tried booting into Windows 2000 from the original hard drive, which was able to get the setup program going from the CD. Now I have a clean install on a separate partition that I'm going to try cloning to the new drive.

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