Need HELP! Reformatting/Recovery of T21 OEM CD

[DrGrafix]

Hi Folks...

I should be in a good mood, but I've screwed up big time and I need a great collective effort to help me out. I just sold my T21 and since the recovery cd wouldn't reformat my HDD, I did something stupid (probably). I formatted the C: portion of my HDD with a old Windows floppy, might've been W98SE or perhaps (UGH!) the WinME floppy.

At any rate, I cannot seem to get past booting the floppy and creating the virtual drive or whatever they call that. But when I pull the floppy ultrabay out and put in the CD drive, I can't seem to get the CD to go past spinning on boot and then nothing happening.

I need to find a sure-thing way to get W2K Pro back on to the HDD. I have my OEM IBM recovery CD, I have Partition Magic CD v.6.0, and I have my desktop's W2K silver CD. Every time I try to make the four W2K recovery disks using my silver W2K cd on my desktop, one of them seems to go bad (corrupt) in the install process while loading on the laptop.

Should I try something like IBM's "WIPE" utility or perhaps something like "KILLDISK" which supposedly will erase everything from a HDD?

I am desperate, so I will try anything. Thanks in advance for any/all advice.

Mike

[sktn77a]

Go into the BIOS and make sure CDROM is the first boot deveice. Then just boot the computer with the W2k recovery CD in it. Shouldn't take more than that (?!) The recovery CD should repartition and reformat the drive as a default.

[JHEM]

Mike,

WTH did you do!?!? Just BOOT from the recovery CD and all should be fine. You DO have the CD as the first BOOT device, right?

Or, if you've screwed up the HD's partition tables, get a W98SE boot disk from somewhere and FDISK and remove all of the partitions on the HD, then BOOT from the recovery CD.

Or, download the W2K BOOT floppies from M$ and use them to install the recovery.

Keep us informed.

Regards,

James

[DrGrafix]

James...

Man, I get the feeling I screwed the pooch, but maybe I'm over-reacting. OK, well, I did get a W98 boot disk and FDisk'd the 40 Gig drive. Then I powered down, and removed the floppy unit, reinstalled the CD/DVD drive, and rebooted with the IBM Recovery CD in it. The drive spins, sounds like everything is going OK, but then I get an error:

Error Loading Operating System
Press key to reboot

No matter how many times I press any key, the error just repeats itself. It's been so long since I built a scratch machine using W98, that maybe I forgot something? Should I now try to build the four floppies needed to get W2K going, or should I have copied formatted the C: partition (the only partition) with the W98 "/S" to get the system files on the HDD?

I think I'll try to make the four disks again and see if that works. But please chime in if anyone has any other ideas.

EDIT 10 Minutes Later: Made the four disks from my regular W2K CD, now when I boot the machine with the #1 floppy, I get the following error:

BOOT: I/O error reading disk
please insert another disk

Go figure.

I have to find out if I'm in fact using the right floppies and how to use the recovery cd. When I upgraded the drive last year, this was a piece of cake. I put in a a 40 Gig HDD GNX, put in the recovery cd, and BAM! Everything just fell into place. I just can't seem to get the CD to be 100% acknowledged. Is there anything in the BIOS that needs to be changed other than having the CD-ROM boot first, then floppy, then HDD? I don't need any OS files, and of course, I'm not supposed to hot-swap the floppy and CD drives right? Should I start the computer with my W2K CD rather than the IBM Recovery CD?

Mike

[JHEM]

Mike,

If you want to send me the HD email me, I can load W2K on it for you.

I know you're under the gun here because the unit is already sold.

As I mentioned in a NG reply I sent, it sounds like the CD you have isn't bootable. Is it a copy you got from somewhere or the original IBM?

Regards,

James

[DrGrafix]

James...

I may take you up on that offer if I can't get something going in the nex 24 hours. The CD is the original IBM CD. It's inside the drive right now and I can't give you the P/N that is printed on it, but I'll edit the post when I've finished formatting the drive. Formatting a 40 Gig drive is not something that happens quickly.

I should've left it alone as it had W2K running just fine yesterday, but I was concerned about removing all my personal data from administrator settings and documents & settings.

As noted earlier, I used this recovery CD when I upgraded the HDD last year.

Late EDIT: HDD is formatted with W98 floppy and has system files and it boots to a command prompt in C:\. While the CD drive spins up, there's no CD driver nor is there a recognized CD drive letter. I have a hunch that if I could somehow get the CD drivers and related stuff on the machine... the recovery CD would be fine. Incidentally, the "Product Recovery CD-ROM for IBM ThinkPad T21 MT 2647 that I have has a part number on the label - September 2000 - IBM P/N 23P1834. And unfortunately, it says right on it "English/Windows NT/Non-Bootable" so while it has everything on it, this CD won't boot by itself. If anyone wants to suggest what the edits to the boot files should be to get the cd going, go ahead.

Mike

[DrGrafix]

OK, it's 2:00 AM and I'm still here. Just tried loading my regular W2K CD and from a cold start it seems to be loading W2K onto the HDD. I don't know how it'll shake out once it's done or whether I should use the recovery CD once I'm done. So any advice on that would be appreciated.

EDIT: W2K is up and running, but I somehow need to get all the T21-specific drivers or a full recovery going somehow. Right now the screen is at 800 X 600 and it looks like crap. Since the IBM CD is not a bootable CD, I can't run the recovery from it. So all the PC Doctor stuff, 1400 X 1050 screen drivers... NADA. Should I be looking on IBM's website?

GOOD MORNING! OK... got it all back together again. W2K is up and running, did my diagnostics, got most all the drivers in place, and reinstalled Office 2000. Gawd is that 1400 X 1050 screen gorgeous! Well, I'm off to work, and I'll have to ship tomorrow, but at least the new owner will get a nice clean setup that he can modify to suit his needs.

I won't go into it here, but I think I'll put the HP 3 GHz machine up on eBay for a few days to see if I can get out unscathed. It's actually a great desktop replacement machine that is portable, but since I have two desktops already... I think if I sell it I go shopping on eBay for a T30 with a 2.0GHz HDD and the SXGA+ graphics. James will appreciate that. And if I don't get my price... I can live with the HP. Thanks for all the help guys. And no, you haven't seen the last of me here.

Mike (great sigh of relief)

[JHEM]

Mike,

The root cause of all the problems you had is due to the fact that the CD you were using is the wrong one!

You were attempting to load W2K from the WindowsNT CD which, as you noted, isn't bootable. Look around for the separate W2K recovery CD which is bootable.

Glad to hear you got it worked out.

Regards,

James

[DrGrafix]

Yup... it's all set, and of course, the bootable CD uncovered itself as I was packing everything tonight! Thanks again for the help and encouragement.

Say... since I'm the adventurous type, I was wondering whether the T30 series is as easy to upgrade CPUs as the T21? What are the options available to me if I wind up with say... a P4 1.6Ghz or maybe a 2.0 Ghz? Of course, this is down the road. I'd have to sell the HP which I could probably get$1400.00+shipping for if I'm lucky. Cheapest I could find it online with pricegrabber was $1519.00 + shipping. Since it's still unregistered and delivered as of 5-20-2004 it's a great buy for someone looking for a "portable" desktop.

Mike