Thinkpads Forum

Hi Everyone,

first of all thanks to the forum for the great advice on here - I now have a 240X with WiFi.

But I am having some issues fitting a new HDD and installing Windows and Ubuntu on this laptop.

I have no floppy or PCMCIA CD drive, and no IBM floppy disks.

So far only one route has worked for me and that is to copy all the files from the old drive onto the new one.

If I put the drive into another laptop and do a fresh install of windows, or try to format the HDD with more than one partition windows will not boot on the TP.

Ubuntu runs fine on the 240X, and windows will boot with no problems if the drive is put into another laptop.

I have had two symptoms - either bootloader will not run, or it will give me the default boot menu, then refuse to start windows. When I had GRUB installed, it will start Ubuntu, but has the same problem with Windows.

So I now have Windows XP running by copying everything from the old drive (FAT32) to the new one (NTFS ). But any changes and the TP will not boot windows.

So does the 240X depend on some custom windows installation, or is it very fussy about disk partitions?

Any help gratefully received!

I have a 240x and what I was use the format/s command on the HDD, then put the entire contents of the XP CD on it. Ran the install from the hard drive and had no problems.

With the dual boot issue, I think I have a similar problem with dual booting Mint and XP on my A31. XP installs fine but if I try to set up dual boot, the installation will fail and the MBR is altered so even XP can start up anymore. I still haven't figured out what to do with that.

OK - I have a 570E - which is very similar, in that its basically a single spindle machine, and I don't have any of the propietary external CD, floppy drives etc.

My solution is this ...

The place you want to be is :-

have at least one (I prefer 2) partition formatted FAT(32) - the first (or only) partition needs to be flagged as active. This partition also needs to be "sys-ed", and it needs 2 additional files - himem.sys and smartdrv.exe as well as a config.sys file that loads himem.sys. One of the partitions also needs the i386 folder on your winxp install cd.


So - there are quite a few ways to get to this point - I'll descibe my own one.

1) Put the disk (onto which you want to install xp) on to a USB->IDE adapter, and connect to another PC running windows . Create the partition(s) with disk management, format it (them) as FAT32. Then copy the i386 folder from your xp CD onto one of those partitions. Then find a copy of smartdrv.exe and himem.sys from a win98 bootdisk (quite useful thing - you can get an image of this from www.bootdisk.com). Put these 2 files into the root of your first partition. Then use notepad to create a config.sys file - it just needs the line

device=himem.sys

..... now you're almost set.

Now you need to set the first (or only) partition as active. One way is to use fdisk, but fdisk (being a bit stupid) can only set the current "c" drive as active - so now your target drive has to the only HD in the machine. You could do this in another laptop or use a 40-44pin adapter and put the disk in a desktop machine.
Now boot the machine from your win98 boot floppy (or use a bootable CD that has the win98 boot floppy as its "boot image".
Use fdisk to set the first partition as active. Then use the command

sys c:

to sys the drive.

Put the disk back in your 240X. It should boot to a c:\ boot prompt.
Now run smartdrv.exe. Then - tada .... cd into the i386 folder and type winnt .... the winxp setup should now start ... the rest I'm sure you know.

N.B. Its better to sys the drive in a machine of vaguely similar age/architecture to your 240X ... I suspect variations in LBA translation lead to the disk not being bootable somehow.

There are many variations on this procedure - probably more elegant ones - but this _does_ work.

Enjoy !!

Hi,

In my experience you MUST fdisk and format your partitions in your 240x to make a successful install of winxp.
So I suggest you get an ibm fdd (not usb) and an win 98 start up disquette.

After making an small (1.5 MB) partition, continue with copying the i386, and the rest of the procedure. There are several clear explanations in this site.

I used unetbootin to install xubuntu and have a dual booting.

Good luck

In my experience you MUST fdisk and format your partitions in your 240x to make a successful install of winxp.

I've done it by fdisking and formatting in another machine (i.e. used a T20 to sys a drive destined for my 570E). I really don't think the 240X is any different in this respect. But I do agree that a very different machine (like a VIA-chipset AMD mobo desktop) can fail.

Quick update - partition magic running on the TP worked with no problems. Thanks for all the tips.