Thinkpads Forum

Hey, I'm new here.
I'd like you to excuse me for my English, since it's not my first language.

I scraped an old 760ED (XGA) Thinkpad for 200 nis (40$ or so ..) to make a testing system for kernels.. It has a CDROM and a hard drive (2.1GB), but has no floppy drive.

And here is the problem, Windows NT won't boot anymore, complaining about a corrupt kernel file. This laptop seemingly doesn't boot off a CD, and as I said - I have no floppy drive.

So the obvious question is, how do I boot it into somehing ?
I tend to think that i'll have to aquire somehing else, but I truely would like to try any alternatives..

I cannot connect the hard drive to my desktop, since I do not have the adaptor. The laptop also has a PCMCIA ethernet card, could I somehow use it to boot up?

I've seen a floppy drive on eBay just for me, but although it costs 4$, the shipping to Israel would probably vlaue around 40$ (If I'm not mistaken) .. So I probably won't buy a floppy with the cost of the whole laptop

I'll be glad if you help me a bit .. Thanks.

http://www.freedos.org
I think there is a way to create a FreeDOS bootable floppy from the files at this site.

Perhaps you can find someone with a Win98 pc and create a bootable floppy?

The problem is that Keyme doesn't have a floppy drive.

If I had a spare for that model, I would send it to you for next to nothing.

Do you have access to a laptop that does have floppy that you can temporarily move the hard drive to?

AlphaKilo470 wrote:Do you have access to a laptop that does have floppy that you can temporarily move the hard drive to?

Is the hard drive connector the same on new Thinkpads as on the old ones ?

The connector on the hard dive itself is the same for all standard 2.5" laptop IDE drives. To use the drive in a different computer or in an eclosure though, you'll have to take the drive out of the caddy.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:The connector on the hard dive itself is the same for all standard 3.5" laptop IDE drives. To use the drive in a different computer or in an eclosure though, you'll have to take the drive out of the caddy.

Thank you
I'm going to try it out.
Hope it's finaly going to work

Well, I coundn't find anayone that was willing to give his/her laptop for that goal, but I found one who gave me an adapter to connect a standard 2.5" HDD to a 3.5" IDE connection.

I plugged it in, power cable, IDE,
And ofcourse - by Murphys law, it doesn't work..

It's possible to connect the adaptor in 2 ways, one way causes the computer to hang on the motherboard's logo screen, and while the other boots normally, the hard drive is not found in the BIOS.

I don't think I've damaged the HD, since when I put it back into the caddy - the same error as before appears. When I test the HD in the Thinkpad's BIOS it syas that it's "OK".

So am I missing something here, or is the adapter dead ?

P.S
I tested it on another, older desktop, although it doesn't hang in both ways, it isn't found anyway ..

You might have to use a jumper to designate the drive as a slave, while in a PC. Also, I generally connect them to the second IDE cable...the one that normally connects to the CD drives.

tfflivemb2 wrote:You might have to use a jumper to designate the drive as a slave, while in a PC. Also, I generally connect them to the second IDE cable...the one that normally connects to the CD drives.

Tried this, but nothing new happens ..
My main HDD is SATA and not IDE, so I have a free IDE channel, I connected it there separately, with all jumper configuraions possible (I think ..), I aslo connected it instead of the IDE channel of the CD (and DVD) drives (also, in all jumper configs I tried before). The only thing that I can't do is to connect it to the same wire (togeather) as the CD drive, beacase it lacks one pin-hole.

Now I used a stethoscope to check if the hard drive is even spinning (yes I am that desperate), and I can't hear any noise.

So what is wrong with it ?
It certanly is spinning while it's in the caddy, connected to the laptop.

Update:

I looked a bit and found a cable with all pin-holes open, so I connected the CD drive and the laptops HD on the same IDE cable.

However, now the CD doesn't appear as well. When I disconnect the HD, the CD appears as before.

What does this mean ?