Thinkpads Forum

I purchased the 570 used on Ebay, no floppy or CDROM. I would like to setup up the hard drive to have a restore partition similar to the more modern Thinkpads.

There is a directory of W98 setup files as well as the usual Windows directory.

Any help would be appreciated. I think I am going to need an external floppy, which appear to be available on eBay. But even so using fdisk will cause me to loose the W98 directory.

You will need some way to get the files off of the cd and on to your hard drive.
Assuming the hard drive is empty the simplest way is to make bootable C: partition and a 500 meg D: partition with fdisk.
Then copy the "Win98" folder from the win 98 install cd into the D: drive.
Then cd to D:\Win98 and type setup. Windows will install normally.
The advantage to this is when you install programs later and the need files from the windows install disk it will automatically go get them from the D: drive.
After windows is installed you could use Norton Ghost or some other imaging program to image your installation and save to the D: drive, then you could restore the installation from the image which would be a lot faster than re-installing from scratch.