ThinkPad 600E and Booting Disk icon

[neftv]

I come across a ThinkPad 600E. It has 512 Ram, CD drive, HD is 12gig?. Appears to power on with one beep sound the screen shows IBM logo on right top and ThinkPad logo bottom left. What it seems to do is boot up to an image of a floppy drive with a Floppy disk with arrows flashing in then at the bottom row of F keys with F1 looking as pushed in with arrows point to press it.
I read online that pushing and holding F1 key while powering on will bring up a way to get to a Easy setup Menu but it don't happen so I stop when the Floppy disk icon shows up.
I dont have a Floppy disk drive for this but what Disk is it asking for? I was thinking I could but some Linux version on this to make it work. PCLinuxOS perhaps. Comments and help appreciated. Thanks.

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

That floppy disk-boot animation is basically telling you that the system could not find a bootable drive and that you should look into providing one. If you are sure that the system has a hard drive installed, power the laptop off, wait a few seconds, push and hold the F1 key and the turn the system back on. Keep pushing the F1 key until you see the Easy-Setup (BIOS) screen. If this does not work, then power off the system, remove the hard drive and try it again. If you can now access the Easy-Setup menu, I'd say that the hard drive has some problem and is preventing the system from booting normally.

Assuming that you can get to Easy-Setup with the hard drive in the system, select the Start Up icon (click on it using the Trackpoint or use the arrows and Enter key), then the Power On icon. You should see a list from 1 to 4 (boot device order) with icons indicating the device to be used. Click on the Reset icon to clear the list and then select from the icons below. For this test, I'd only put the HDD-1 icon in the boot list. When done, click on the OK button to save the list, then the Exit button to get out of the Start Up menu, then the Restart icon and finally the OK button. If you still cannot get the system to boot off the hard drive, then either something's (electrically) wrong with it or it does not have an operating system on it.