Thinkpads Forum

Hi everyone,

Just got myself a 570E off ebay with no CD drive or HDD. I can get hold of a small(ish) HDD, but just wanted to know if I can boot the Laptop from an external USB CD drive (to install XP) or would I need to install an Ultrabase? Are there any advantages of using an Ultrabase? The laptop will be for my two young boys to play/practice on so didnt want to spend too much money getting XP on it

I have tried to boot it from an 80GB HDD with XP pre-installed (NTFS format) but am not getting any joy - just a black screen with flashing cursor after the bios post Is this just down to the way the HDD has been formatted and XP installed (on my Vaio) or is there something much more sinister going on??

Any help would be appreciated for a complete noooob to Thinkpads!!

Cheers

theeternal wrote:Hi everyone,
I have tried to boot it from an 80GB HDD with XP pre-installed (NTFS format) but am not getting any joy - just a black screen with flashing cursor after the bios post Is this just down to the way the HDD has been formatted and XP installed (on my Vaio) or is there something much more sinister going on??

It wont boot you will need a external cd drive and reinstall the OS, the Vaio is totally different in hardware.

Read this thread:

How to Fresh Install Win XP (Step-by-Step Guide)

Hi cmarti,

Thanks for the reply ... the link on that first post on that topic doesnt seem to work (dead!).

Any idea where the staps may be posted elsewhere?

Cheers!