Thinkpads Forum

I bought a 380ED on ebay (80 meg RAM, 2 Gig HD) to play around with. The laptop was described as having the hard drive wiped and formatted, ready to install my OS. When I turned it on the Windows 98 screen appeared briefly and the screen looked fine but the red touch button didn't seem to work. So I used the arrow keys for awhile. Then I turned off the laptop and turned it on again and...nothing. The CD-ROM did work for I heard it whirring when I put the Windows 98SE installation CD in. But after moments of whirring it would stop. I tried putting a 98SE boot disk (downloaded from bootdisk.com) in the floppy drive and then powering up. Nothing, just the blank screen. I went to the IBM website and they said that pressing the F! button and then turning on the power will bring up the set-up screen. But this didn't happen. Any suggestions what I do now.
Thanks.

I checked the online repair manual for Thinkpads and the first suggestion, that I remove everything including the battery and then power up, worked. It seems that the Windows 98 OS wasn't erased from the HD and it works fine. I could even go into the setup screen using the F1 key. But a new problem which I'll post separately: where is the telephone hookup? I've looked all over the laptop and don't see it.

I found out why I couldn't find the 380ED modem. According to the manual's specifications it doesn't have one. I guess they meant for one to use a PCMCIA modem card.