Thinkpads Forum

I was given a ThinkPad 760E and there is no o/s on it . Ok now here is the thing I want to put wins 98 se on it , but the cd-rom is not being recognized. Can someone pls help me !

Find someone who has WIN98SE running OK on their computer, and have them make you a "WIN98SE Start-Up Diskette." Put this diskette in your floppy drive and the CD in your CD drive. When you turn on the power, you will boot from the floppy. It will ask you if you want CD ROM support. Reply "yes." It will install temporary CD ROM drivers. When it is done, at the DOS prompt, type E:\startup.exe (it will probably temporarily assign your CD drive the letter E, not D), and it will start loading WIN98SE.

There is one other alternative, if you are comfortable going into your BIOS setup. I don't know if your particular Thinkpad supports this, but if you can make the CD ROM a bootable device, your problems should be solved. With the CD in the drive, boot your computer, and it should start OK. But if you can't get this to work, the WIN98SE Start-Up Diskette method will do the job.

Unfortunately the 760 series don't support CD BOOT in the BIOS.

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:Unfortunately the 760 series don't support CD BOOT in the BIOS.

Thanks, I wasn't sure about this.

Also-->just checked my WIN98SE CD, and you need to type E:\setup.exe, NOT "startup.exe" ... sorry about that.

I forgot to mention there is only one spot for the floppy and cdrom(there interchangeable) and when I boot with the boot disk it says device driver not found: MSCD001. No vallid CDROM device drivers selected. So it won't load the CDROM drivers.

I think we have addressed this before.

Ideally you need to have an external floppy drive and the CD in the computer. I had a Dock I for my 760E (slimline) because you couldn't install a CD in it; that works, too.

I think what we suggested was that you use the Windows 98 boot floppy to format the hard drive, SYS the hard drive, and then copy all of the contents of the floppy to the hard drive. Now the hard drive is bootable, and will recognize the CD.

Hope this helps.

Now I really have problems, I let my brother(let me see it I went to DeVry ya know) have a look at the laptop and now it starts up and only goes to the easy-setup window and when I go to start up and select the boot sequence it shuts down and restarts back to the easy-setup do I trash it and move on or can it be fixed ?

Make sure that your brother plugged all the parts back in properly. If you aren't sure where everything goes, download something called "VOL4HMM.PDF" from IBM. This gives the disassembly/reassembly instructions.

Most likely you have either the hard drive, floppy/cd or one memory module improperly attached. Or one of the two CMOS batteries could be unplugged (located under the palm rest).

Is there an error message attached to the display you get? That may be a clue to what the problem is.

Also, if you are really in Easy Setup (and not just getting an error window that looks like Easy Setup), try issuing an Initialize (don't remember where that button is on the 760; it's been a long time).

Hope this helps.