Win XP on Thinkpad 240X?

[dog1phil]

New here, sorry if I am in wrong area, Anyone have any luck or experience in installing XP on the 240X....Any help would be
appreciated thanks!

[verktyg]

New here, sorry if I am in wrong area, Anyone have any luck or experience in installing XP on the 240X....Any help would be
appreciated thanks!

I have 2 identical PIII 500 192MB 240x ThinkPads. One runs Win98SE and the other WinXP SP2.

They both run very well. I upgraded the HDD in the Win98SE 240x from the original 12G 4200 RPM to a new 20G 5400 RPM HDD. It made a real difference so I would suspect that one of the newer 7200 RPM drives would really fly.

The one 240x came with XP installed. I Installed SP2 and all of the MS and IBM updates. It ran much better after I "de-MAC-ed" it and switched to the Classic Look, getting rid of the Jelly Bean appearance and all of the animation and other useless visual effects.

I had to install Win98SE on the other one. OS installations are a little difficult on the 240 series TPs. They don't seem to want to install from a CD.

You need and IBM external Floppy drive that plugs into a special socket on the left side of the 240x. If you don't have one, non-USB drives that fit 770, 770E, 770X, 770Z, 560, 560X 560E, 560Z, 570, 570Z, 600X, 600E, 600 Series ThinksPads should work.

You will also need a PCMCIA/PC Card CD drive.

The most frequently recommended way to install XP is to boot with a floppy that has Cardsoft drivers for the PCMCIA slot and the CD drive then copy the CD to the HDD. Some suggest that you partition the drive and copy the CD into the 2nd partition.

Another method that I heard was to get or make the 6 WinXP setup floppies.

Make a Win98 Boot Floppy and remove all of the unnecessary files and add those needed. Here's my Boot Floppy contents:

COMMAND.COM
EMM386.EXE
HIMEM.SYS
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS ( containing only ;SYS )
SMARTDRV.EXE
MOUSE.COM
MOUSE.INI
CONFIG.SYS
AUTOEXEC.BAT

Here's my CONFIG.SYS

SET TEMP=C:\TEMP
SET TMP=C:\TEMP
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=D000-DFFF
REM CardSoft(TM) 5.32 PCMCIA DRIVERS
DEVICE=A:\CARDXTND.SYS
DEVICE=A:\SSCBTI.SYS /numada:1 /ada1skts:1
DEVICE=A:\CS.SYS
DEVICEHIGH=A:\CSALLOC.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=A:\ATADRV.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=A:\MTSRAM.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=A:\MTDDRV.EXE
DEVICE=A:\CARDID.SYS
DEVICE=A:\ (CD Drivers as required)
DEVICE=A:\ (CD Drivers as required)
INSTALL=A:\CS_APM.EXE

Get the Cardsoft drivers here and copy all of them to the boot floppy:

D/L P Pctpirds.exe and Pctpirds.txt

http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-496LSQ

Most of the Cardsoft files are unecessary but I installed them all to suppress error messages.

Here's my AUTOEXEC.BAT:

SMARTDRV.EXE
MOUSE.COM

There's an extended discussion in the comp.sys.laptops news group covering a lot of relevant issues:

Subject: Windows 98 Install On Laptop with No CD-Drive?

Here's another thread this forum that has some info:

Help with DOS Drivers for SCSI PC Card for 240x - Ghost

Good luck....

[MASS]

You can put the 2,5" Harddisk in your regular stationary comp. and put the WinXP CD/DVD on the HDD and just return it and install.

[verktyg]

You can put the 2,5" Harddisk in your regular stationary comp. and put the WinXP CD/DVD on the HDD and just return it and install.

Yes, but you have to be careful that the desktop does not change the 2.5" HDD's geometry in the MBR. I had that problem when I first tried that method with Win98SE on my 240x.

I had to put the drive back in to my 240x and run Fdisk and reformat it to get the TP to recognize the correct HDD size. It might have happened because I was using a full SCSI PC and plugged an IDE cable into the mobo so the 2.5" became the Master Drive on the first IDE controller. I had to go into the BIOS to get the PC to recognize the 2.5" HDD.

Also, never try to Fdisk or Format the 2.5" HDD on a desktop. Only do those operations in the laptop that the drive is going to be used in.