Thinkpads Forum

Hi, new user here!

I've inherited a TP240 from a mate whose company were retiring 'em. It's come with an external FDD, but no CDR drive.

I've managed to get hold of a USB CDR no problem, but now I'm having a complete nightmare trying to get the thing to work so I can get an OS installed.

Before having a go, I did some research & found out that the USB CD wouldn't be bootable. So I downloaded both the IBM diskette for using the recovery CD via a USB CD drive and also a load of other USB DOS drivers.

Sadly, none of them seem to pick up the CD drive.

The IBM disk just sits there on a blue screen saying "please wait" after selecting the drive.

The other drivers just don't seem to work and refuse to see the device.

I've even created my own W98 boot diskette with a bog standard autoexec & config with just the USB driver and no joy.

Has anyone else encountered this?

I'm starting to think the USB might be screwed as the USB drive works no problem at all when I plug it into my desktop. But as I've got no other way of testing the 240, I can't be 100% sure as I can't get an OS on the thing!

Any help greatly recieved as I've seen other 240's in action and despite being a bit long in the tooth, it seems just what I need.

Cheers!

buy a 15 dollar adapter to install the 240's hard drive in your desktop... install a simple win98 dos on it, copy the files from your os of choice, reinstall to your 240, and boot and run the install. Most usb devices only work in windows... the ibm program was probably looking for the IBM cdrom

Yeah, I'm pretty resigned to that course of action now.

Got one on the way, so I'll get it going eventually. Just hope I don't have all that effort and then discover the USB is indeed knackered!

Be just my flippin' luck.

Cheers for the advice tho.

Same challange here cept I don't have a externall USB or PCMCIA cd drive. Found a NIB Backpacker USB/parallel port CDRW drive on that auction site and paid less than $40. Will make it much easier to install an OS on both the 240 and the 701C. Won't really bother me if it won't write, as long as it will read CDs.

Since all the difficulties is to get the installer files of your system(no matter if it's win98,win2k, winxp) into the hard drive, I would use linux on a floppy(s) to boot the computer. Recently all major linux floppy-version system has the usb driver compile-in so it's not a problem to copy your CD into hard drive.

Then use your win98 floppy to boot the computer, start the normal setup/installation process and you are all set.

The linux floppies I used was from slackware 10.1.

I do have a question though. Does anyone try insert any USB2.0 pc card/cardbus on their TP240 and get it working? I could do that with Syba(NEC chip) USB2.0 card and it worked with the usb laptop hd enclosure but not the cdrom/cdrw. Everytime I tried to use cdrw the computer just shuts itself down no matter which OS I was using. I guess it's because the computer doesn't have enough power for the external device. I would like to know if there is any USB2.0 card working on TP 240.


teetee

Cheers for the advice.

Thankfully I managed to create a w98 boot disk and my FDD was working, so I booted from that & fdisk'ed the HDD so I had a small 500mb partition, into which I copied the i386 folder from the Win2k CD (good tool here was an external 2.5" USB HDD caddy I got from eBay for about 2 pounds. Lifesaver!).

Took a while to do it's stuff etc, but it's running perfectly now. Just got to add the latest Service Pack etc to polish it off.

I think my CD woes were caused by having a non-IBM USB CD drive as as soon as W2k was installed, that works fine as well.

Guess the chipset/driver doesn't recognise it.