Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

Is it possible to get the ThinkPad 760EL to boot off an Internal CDROM drive?

I replaced the Internal Floppy with the CDROM.
This Drive works fine under various OS's DOS/95/98/2000.
However I can't seem to make the thing boot from a CD.
There is no CD Icon under the STARTUP list in BIOS.
This seems a little strange as this machine seems to be made for a cdrom drive.

Thanks

Think760 wrote:Is it possible to get the ThinkPad 760EL to boot off an Internal CDROM drive?

The short answer is no, the BIOS doesn't support booting from a CD drive.

The long answer is that the 760 and other early Thinkpads can be made to boot with CD support enabled by formatting the HD with a W98 floppy, copying CD files to the HD and editing the autoexec.bat and command.sys files to load the CD drivers.

See: http://www.thinkpads.com/ftp_resource.htm and get BOOTDISK.EXE and READ BOOTDISK.TXT!

Regards,

James

You can't boot a 760 series laptop off the intrnal CD-ROM. It may be possible to boot off a PCMCIA CD drive since you can boot from the PCMCIA slots, but the internal CD-ROM can not be booted from. Your best bet is to get the MS DOS system files on your hard drive as well as the CD drivers, then work from there.

Thanks for the advise.

I assumed this was the case but I had to check.

I will do as you suggest with BAT files and CD drivers on the HD.

Try this:
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

you CAN boot a 760 from the cd, but you need to install the version 9.57 ibm diskmanager overlay. search the driverguide.com forum where i've put it. copying cd rom drivers to the hard drive will NOT allow you to boot from the cd rom - it will only allow you to access the cd rom.