Thinkpads Forum

My father has an IBM 385XD that the hard drive has gone bad.
The "Ol'Man" doesn't want to get a new one as he is very attached to this laptop.

We purshased a new hard drive (Hitachi 20 Gig model# IC25N020ATMR04-0) and switched it with the old one in the retaining bracket.

The problem that I am having is that I can't get into the Bios to configure the drive so that the OS can be installed (use the recovery disks).

Any help would be welcome.
I hope I got this in the right forum.

I don't understand the problem. When you say that you can't get into the BIOS do you mean that you don't know how or that a PW is preventing it?

To enter EZSetup, press and hold the F1 key down while turning on the unit. Release after the MEMCOUNT completes and you hear the POST beep.

You'll then be able to initialize the system with the new HD installed.

Restart the system with the BOOT diskette from the recovery CD in the floppy drive and the CD in the CD drive. After the unit BOOTs from the floppy, you have to run FDISK and when it asks if you want to enable LBA support you must answer NO! FDISK a primary partition of 2GB and set it as active, then reboot the machine again from the floppy.

Run the recovery utility on this BOOT and the CD will re-install W95 or W98, whichever your machine came with.

See also: http://www.thinkpads.com/hints.htm

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:To enter EZSetup, press and hold the F1 key down while turning on the unit. Release after the MEMCOUNT completes and you hear the POST beep.

You'll then be able to initialize the system with the new HD installed.

That did the trick.
This is the first IBM laptop that I have replaced a HDD in so the "EZSetup" was very new to me, but I have to say that that is one slick little tool IBM has there.

Well at this time the interactive portion of the recovery is over and it's humming along.

I'd like to thank JHEM and the Site Admin for this board.
If there is anything I can do to help out let me know. zehn@lostlegions.us

James (zehn)