Thinkpad 240 2609-31H from the dumpster

[Frosty]

Hi, I just found a sad little TP 240 with a Celeron366, 6.4GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM. There are numerous faults with the unit:

1. Pinkish tint on cold boot only - this can be resolved by smacking the bottom of the LCD hard - I think it's a backlight problem

2. Misbehaving Windows 98 - will only start in safe mode. Otherwise, hangs at a black screen with a flashing _ cursor.

3. No CDROM / floppy drive - Scavengers can't be choosers...

4. Pokemon cards and a "business card" CDROM jammed in the PCMCIA slot - got rid of the whole lot of junk. The pins in the PCMCIA slot are perfect.

5. DANGEROUS LOOKING power adaptor - the AC CORD to the charger is frayed. Someone just "repaired" it with gooey bunches of electrical tape. Looks soggy too. But, charges!

Question: How do I reformat the hard drive and put W98 on it to make it a happy ThinkPad? I have a laptop-to-desktop HD adaptor, but I can't install W98 on my Pentium 4 PC because it has 1GB of RAM. How do I format the HD in my P4 as FAT32, copy the whole W98SE CDROM contents and the ThinkPad drivers into it and make it bootable so it can be installed without a floppy/CDROM drive? My PC is running Server 2003 Enterprise SP1. And, do something about the power brick?

Question 2: How do I drain the laptop of its CMOS power so the setup will be COMPLETLY cleared? I suspect corrupt CMOS RAM data. (The BIOS will sometimes display garbage data on the config screen, like the japanese Yen symbol and numerous weird blocks on various configuration data)

Oh yeah, before anyone asks, the TP has a working Li-Ion battery!

Many MANY thanks.