Thinkpads Forum

I think I killed my th9inkpad. I was trying to get the wireless crap to work and now when I start the computer I get what looks like a lame picture of the floppy and it appears that it wants me to insert some sort of disk. Under that is F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 F11 F12

i AM SOOOO STUPID:((

It has been a long time since I have seen that, but I think it wants you to enter the BIOS config. Is there a power on password? Just enter it. If you still have problems, try removing the Wireless card temporarily.
... JD Hurst

The wireless card is out and I still have the problem. It won't boot up. It just goes to the screen I mentioned before

Reseat the HD. For whatever reason the machine can't "see" it and is asking for a BOOT floppy.

Regards,

James

I did it but still the same thing. Could the hard drive be dead? That would suck. It sound like something is loose inside the hard drive?

calired67 wrote:I did it but still the same thing. Could the hard drive be dead? That would suck. It sound like something is loose inside the hard drive?

Yes, the HD could be dead, but noises aren't an absolute indicator of anything bad depending on the model HD.

Can you hear the HD spin up when you turn the machine on?

Got any way to check the HD on another machine?

Regards,

James

You may have hozed either the boot sector or the OS on your HD, it may or may not be easily fixed. Hard to tell without hands on for me, Others may have more luck, but if you can get a proper emergency boot disk for your OS you shold be able to view the HD if you can see it then it's not too bad, but you will need the EBD kit for your computer (Emergency boot disk, may be one floppy, may be six depends on the OS)

I tried starting the thing again this morning. And was hitting F8 hoping something miraculous would happen. Here is what happened. A blue screen popped up with error 0301 It was some sort of portal to test everything on the computer from the system board to display and everything in between. Everything checked out ok. Except it would not test the HDD it had a place for it but acted like it wasn't there? Is this any help?

Then something fried on the hard drive interface could be the machine or the drive, check the drive on another machinge or, you only have an 8gb... no huge loss, you can buy a 20 gig for 40bucks on ebay, or a 12 for 25.

301 means you were pressing keys before the BIOS expected you to.

Depending on your model, you may have test software in the BIOS. Otherwise you can download PC Doctor from IBM for your model. Run the test on your hard drive to see if it still works.

If it does, you should try to recover the boot sector with "fdisk /mbr" from any DOS or Windows boot floppy (XP can make such a floppy).

couldn't find pc doctor for this piece of crap. I did find something that started to work then I go this message.....

The following file is missing or corrupt: COMMAND.COM
Type the name of the Command Interpreter(e.g.,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM

I have no idea what this means

Help please:)

Got a floppy drive? BOOT the machine from a W98SE boot floppy and then type fdisk /mbr.

Your Master Boot Record (MBR) appears to be hosed.

Or, your HD has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

Regards,

James

Windows 98 has detected that drice C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition. There are several possible causes.

1. The drive may need to be partitioned. To create a partition on the drive, run fdisk from the MS-DOS command prompt

How do i get there all i have is A:\

i got to C:\ typed fdisk and it says no fixed disk present?????

As I stated earlier based on the greyed out hdd checkup, either your drive or your controller, check the pins, make sure they are straight.