Thinkpad 240 (2609-41U) restore disk and battery replacement?

[thinkingpad11]

I found an old 240 sitting in my uncle storage; works just fine although the OS is shot for good (Windows 98 SE) as the main hdd, and the battery last barely 1h; so I was planning to replace the hdd with a SD card IDE adapter and get a new battery.
Can anyone suggest where to find the original/OEM battery for the 240, and what is the expected operative time with this machine? I would assume at least 3-5 hours right?

Also where can I find the restore CD? And since the machine has no CD, can I use a USB DVD drive to restore the OS? Thanks

[solidpro]

Hi

I've restored many a thinkpad like this and the boot options of this era can be very restrictive. I think the general consensus when you can't easily get restore media and the matching bootable drive is either:

1) If you can get it to boot from a floppy, install the new hard drive and get a Win98 boot image (mainly because I would either be installing DOS/Win 3.11 on FAT16, Win98SE on FAT32, Win2k on NTFS or XP on NTFS). I think maybe Win95/98 is the 'factory era of the 240? So fit the new hard drive of CF via CF-IDE adaptor (make sure the CF card will work in fixed-disk mode) and boot from Win98 floppy, then FDISK, reboot, Format and then SYS C: A: to get the HDD bootable. Then switch out the hard drive to a CF card or USB-IDE reader into a modern PC and copy over the OS CD-ROM contents to a folder and then put back into the 240 and install from there.

2) If you can't get a floppy, find a similar age machine and do the Win98 boot, FDISK, Format and SYS C: A: on another machine, copy the OS CD files to the folder as above and then switch the 'prepped' hard drive into the 240, boot into the hard drive DOS prompt and install.

The drive matrix on thinkpads.com is a brilliant resource and I'm sure you can find all the individual drivers and IBM software, which you can easily copy onto a USB disk and install from Windows.

Hope this helps.

cheers