Thinkpad 600e - upgrade from Win2000 to XP Pro failed

[FieryJack]

hi

re: Thinkpad 600E type 2645-5EG with 256Mb RAM, BIOS 1.19

Was upgrading this box from Windows 2000 as a favour for a neighbour, though I warned them the process could be fraught, as am no expert on Thinkpads.

Step 1: I cleared a load of junk off the rather small 2Gb drive so that there was at least 900Mb free disk space. I think I was careful not to delete any system files.

Step 2: I began the process of installing XP.

Step 3: Unfortunately, as files were being copied from (XP) CD to hard drive, some files were not copied, notably NTFS.sys and NTloader.sys, which I guess are pretty crucial.

Step 4: perhaps not surprisingly, when the PC rebooted problems occured: XP sort of initialises but then blue screens after a few seconds (I can't read the error msg, it disappears off screen too fast). The Thinkpad gets stuck in a loop from hereon in.

So I made a bootable XP CD, tested it on another PC to prove it boots and I think it does as I got the prompt "Install XP?"

I have changed the Thinkpad BIOS to boot from CD ROM and have made this the only available drive. The machine will not however boot from CD. I get an I9990305 error. I see this error relates to no bootable drive being found, but I don't understand this part as I know the CD drive words and Thinkpad's been told it's the only drive.

If I re-enable the hard drive I am back to the XP-starting-but-not-loading loop.

If anyone has vague idea of how to get out of this mess, I will be most grateful.

many thanks.

J

[GomJabbar]

After I wrote the text at the bottom, I looked up the model number you posted, and the 2645-5EG is a 600X, not a 600E. The latest BIOS version for the 600X is 1.11 - ITET55WW. It fixes the following: * (New) Microsoft Windows XP Support, * (Fix) OS installation failure with CD-ROM boot. Here is the BIOS Update page for the 600X.
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Just a little speculating here. Perhaps the CD drive's technology is too old to read the XP CD properly.

I recently had an experience on a desktop PC of mine. This PC has two CD drives. One is a Lite-On CD-RW 24X drive and the other is a Mitsumi 4X CD drive. I could not boot up on the Mitsumi drive with a Windows 98 install CD. In fact, I made a copy of another software CD, copying from the Mitsumi drive to the Lite-On drive. The Lite-On drive could read the original and the copy, but the Mitsumi drive could only read the original. The Mitsumi drive saw the copy a CD audio disk, when in fact it had no CD audio on it. If I clicked on the supposed CD audio file, I got an error message. I suspect that the Mitsumi drive could not read one or more of the following: ISO Level 1, ISO Level 2, Mode 1, Mode 2 /XA, ISO 9660, Joliet, ISO restrictions on; path depth, # of characters in path, or # of characters in Joliet names. I think when the copy was made, one of the above changed.

[Laptop_wizard]

Do not "upgrade" as in loading the CD in the OS, and selecting "upgrade"
Boot up to the CD, and follow the directions from there. you kneed to completely "Format" and install.
The first time I tried to upgrade a 600E, I aslo had tons of problems.

Hope this helps.

[FieryJack]

am pleased to say I got the Thinkpad 600X (not 600E, thanks for correcting me on that) up and running with XP.

Want to offer my thanks to those who helped me.

[GomJabbar]

Great!