Thinkpads Forum

Hey thinkpad people. I just purchased a used 770z. It arrived with a completely blank hard disk.

I need to get on OS on this thing, but am having serious trouble doing so. I cannot seem to get the machine to boot (or even recognize) the swappable DVD/CD-R drive.

I need to use the floppy drive to get to any type of prompt. I've run the CD install diskette from the IBM website, gone into the bios to try to get it to boot to CD but it's just not doing it.

Please Help!

Hello...

Your gonna have to make sure you have the newest Bios installed on the machine....it fixes a problem with booting from CD... http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... SHY-3PGT93...

With the new bios it should boot from the CD no problem...I've installed 95-XP on these,and they always boot right from the install CD,no need for any driver floppies!!

Use a 98 Startup floppy....at the prompt type fdisk/mbr....then after thats done fdisk....delete the current partitions,then make one primary one and make it active....type restart....when the prompt comes up again type format c:....then restart with a OS install CD in and it should start the installation right away....if you install W2K or XP choose the option to format using NTFS(Not Quick)....

Hope this helps....

Greg St.L

I've done all that, and when I go into the bios, it sees the DVD drive just fine, but when I try to boot to that drive I get a graphic which is basicaly asking me t insert a floppy disk into the drive and press F1.

I've no idea what this means.

Have you set the CD drive as the initial BOOT device? Should be CD, FDD, HD1.

Are you sure you have a bootable CD? What flavor of Windoze are you using? Only a few of the W95 and W98 CDs are bootable.

The graphic is telling you that no bootable device was found, insert a BOOT floppy.

Regards,

James