I'm trying to make my "new" x20 work.

[erikair]

This forum is awesome. I wish I had seen it sooner, the links to the drivers on the ibm website and so on - I didn't have much luck finding info there on my own. I now have hope this machine will be restored eventually.

I bought an x20 p600 on ebay with no OS and no cd or floppy drive. Thought I'd use a usb ide adapter. That worked at first, after adjusting the boot device order in the bios, and it booted to knoppix (linux version which runs from the cd) and looked great although ran slowly with OS on that cd getup. Then it stopped working and I get an error message: PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable. Anybody know anything about that? Elsewhere on this forum I read howto make a usb key bootable with memory key boot utility, tried that with an SD memory card in a dazzle usb card reader. My desktop computer will boot to that, but the x20 gives the same error message.

Anyway, I'm going to call IBM and see if I can get the setup disks because I have a Windows 2000 licence sticker on the back as I also read about here, and buy a media slice and cd on ebay which I would want eventually anyway. Getting going withou the drives is too complicated for me.

Thanks for the useful forum.

[monty cantsin]

I bought an x20 p600 on ebay with no OS and no cd or floppy drive.

Congrats!

Then it stopped working and I get an error message: PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable. Anybody know anything about that?

Like this?

http://support.intel.com/support/mother ... -prd36.htm

You mean that suddenly the CD wouldn't boot any longer as it used to? Very strange. Did you try other bootable CDs? How about booting Windows from CD, for instance the WinPE system (in case you're one of the lucky few...

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/prog ... winpe.mspx

...who are allowed to use it) or, as an alternative, the very similar BartPE?

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Getting going withou the drives is too complicated for me.

Provided that your CD drive really won't boot any longer: Is the hard drive that is stuffed into your computer at least already partitioned? (When you partition it in your desktop, chances are high it won't be recognized by your X20... but if you have another ThinkPad, you could try to put it in there and go through the procedures). You could then try and connect the HDD to your desktop computer, format it as FAT32, make it bootable and put the installation files of your operating system in a folder of that drive. Then put the HD back in your X20, let it boot up to the command prompt and start the installation manually:

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 307848
How to start the Setup program from MS-DOS in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... 48&sd=tech

(Works also for Windows 2000.)

[erikair]

I figured out that my usb-ide adapter was at fault, it doesn't show up on any usb port where the other device works. Must have burned out.

Thanks for the directions on how to boot from the hard drive. I'd love to figure it all out, but right now I think I have too much to do to start learning computer fixing at this high level. My ability to navigate around using DOS is pretty limited. Thanks to this forum and a great deal of persistence on my part with IBM circular phone menus I have ordered the SSCD recovery bundle P/N 19K9202 with Windows 2000 pro (which is already licenced to my machine.) I bought an ultrabase X2 media slice and combo drive on ebay, so I think I'll wait until all this arrives to try to get it started. Seemed like less work to put out $200 now for stuff I'll need eventually anyway than to use

What about the partitions from the desktop not working? Do you mean a FAT 32 or unformatted partition would not be recognized by Win2000 installer? The guy at IBM said all I would have to do would be to get the boot device order right in the bios and start up with the cd in the drive.