Thinkpads Forum

I hadn't used this laptop in a while, so tried to turn it on yesterday.
It doesn't boot. After turning it on, it says memory OK, but
then I get a picture of a floppy drive with a picture of a floppy below
it, with flashing arrows connecting the two. Also at the bottom of the
screen is a row of F key squares, with arrows blinking toward the F1 square.
I have Win98 SE installed on this computer.
Can anyone please help?
Thanks in advance.

If you press F1 to enter the BIOS is there a hard drive listed?

It seems your ThinkPad is having trouble finding a boot path.

Brad

Thanks for your help Brad.

When I press F1 and turn it on, I get the icons:
I get "Easy Setup" with the icons: Config, Date/time, Password,
Start up, and Test.

When I go into "Start up", I see there is HDD-1 in square 1,
and the FDD-1 in square 2. I even hit RESET, and placed
both again in the squares.

When I went into "Test", and ran it, I got "OK" for System Board,
Memory, Display, PCMCIA-1, and Parallel.
but for HDD-1, FDD-1, DSP, CDROM-1, and HDD-2, the results
were blank(i.e., no "OK" under their icons).

Still no luck. What do you suggest next?

As long as you've got a floppy drive, run a hard drive diagnostic downloaded from the manufacturers web page. I have no idea what drives were used in a 760EL though. Assuming they were Hitachi, run the Hitachi DFT.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

It's also possible that the boot block on the drive was corrupted so it just won't boot. I'd boot a partitioning floppy (like Ranish Partition Manager) and see if your partitions are still intact.

Or try a floppy that will let you see what's on the drive.

I went to switch the cd-rom drive to floppy drive(to run dft32), and saw that the hard drive was jarred loose.
I pushed it back in, and now all is fine again.
I feel stupid for not even checking that first, but thanks to everyone for all the help.