Thinkpads Forum

I recently acuired an IBM240x complete with floppy and Portable rive bay CD ROM (PCMCIA). I have been trying to do a clean install of XP on it and failing. Can anyone help?

This is what I have managed to do:

- format the drive so no OS present
- using the recovery floppy downloaded from IBM I can boot and load the CDROM driver.
- I've formatted the hard disk and have a 2 GB dos partition
- I've copied the contents of i386 to a c:\i386 directory
- Run Winnt
- It does is stuff and start copying files and then hangs
- I left it a few hours bu then got fed up and rebooted
- When it restarts it looks like it's going to actually install something!
- Then the killer - error message "can't find EULA.txt"
- I've trawled the internet for helpful suggestions which include ensuring tha a path in a .sif file is set to "/" (which it is), ensuring the EULA.txt is in i386 (which it also is)
- I've copied the EULA.txt to c:\ but this doesn't work either

Please - does anyone know how to do a clean install of XP SP1?!

Thanks
Eb

I put XP Pro on a 240X once, and it did not work particulary well. ACPI problems, if I remember correctly.

That said:
1. Go to the IBM Support site for your model 240x and download drivers (newest and for XP) as well as BIOS updates. Update the BIOS first.
2. You need to either save those drivers to a CD so you can use them during an install, or else have NIC drivers available on a CD or diskette so you can get a network connection during the install. That will let you get the drivers from another computer or server.
3. Since loading from CD didn't work, and you have a floppy disk, try downloading the XP SP1 install diskettes (e.g. winxpsp1_en_pro_bf.exe). I changed the filename a bit, so it won't be exactly as shown.
4. Run the file to create the install diskettes (six, I think), and try to install with diskettes. That might work. I recall getting a working install of XP on a 240X using setup disks.

... JDHurst

jd,

after you download the diskettes, are you able to access the CD drive? I know with the 240x that the CD drive does not get recognized even after I boot with a win98 boot disk.

If I remember correctly, the setup disks for Windows 2000 and for Windows XP Pro were able to access the CD Rom. The CD Rom wasn't bootable, but the setup disks had the drivers. It was several years ago and I no longer have the machine. ... JDHurst