Thinkpads Forum

I have been attempting to do a recovery on my Thinkpad 240. However, after it boots from the floppy disk, it does not recognize the CD drive with the recovery CD in it. It just hangs saying "please wait".

At first I was using a CD drive with a PCMCIA card, but read that it was considered an unsupported device. I am now using an IBM USB CD drive, which the 240 will recognize, but will not boot from it.

I checked the BIOS and the CD drive does not even appear as a bootable device in "Startup" The only device listed is the floppy drive.

I have seached for an answer, but everything I find, and try, doesn't seem to work. What am I missing?

I''m not an expert, but I don't think the 240 can boot from anything except (1) the floppy disk, or (2) the hard disk. I don't think there is any way to make the CDROM bootable. I think you have to boot from floppy with a driver that will recognize the cdrom and allow restore.

Yeah. Just borrow someone's slightly older PCMCIA drive, make sure you have a DOS boot disk onboard, load up the oldschool PCMCIA CDROM drivers, and then see if you can at least get the drive recognized in DOS. Once you are in DOS and have the ability to read the CDROM drive, the 2K/XP setup is usually oemsetup.exe on d:\i386 or something similar.

I dont have an answer for you since I am in the same situation. I have a drive bay dvd. I have also tried using a ide adapter to copy windows 2000 onto the drive but the drive is not visible under windows, windows disk manangement but is seen by the device manager and the bios. surely there is some standard way to get an os onto the system.

what a weird situation.. can you only have floppy or cd rom connected at a time? not both? what disc/disk are you booting up with?

no I mean a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter so I can copy the hdd on my desktop.