Oops the screen is red and black.

[Jaye]

Okay, I ordered the hard drive as the forum suggested. Once I installed this the Screen was blk with red letters saying drive not installed and l Should press any button to exit. When I intsall original drive the same thing all over again, please help me I am lost without my computer. ThAnks in advance.

[rkawakami]

The T20 will display the red background/white lettering when it does not find a bootable drive. You either have not cloned (transferred your existing software from the old drive to the new) properly or there is a problem with the disk drive interface on the T20's motherboard.

Most cloning programs should automatically setup the new drive so that it's bootable, but check the program's documentation to see if you need to specify a specific command option to do this. To see if the laptop even recognizes the new drive, access the BIOS (press the F1 key immediately after turning the power on), wait for the red/white/black screen to disappear and then select the BIOS' Startup/Boot menu using the arrow and Enter keys. If the system can detect the hard drive, there should be a "+" sign in front of "Hard Drive". If so, use the arrow keys to highlight the Hard Drive line then press Enter. That should give you a display which lists the manufacturer and/or the model number of the disk drive. If there is no "+" next to the Hard Drive line, then the system did not detect any drive. That could be due to a defective drive, or it's not properly installed, or a problem with the motherboard.

[Jaye]

I think I formated the disk cause I saw a blue screen and I pressed the first option to setup windows on the new hard drive. I saw drivers loading up on the bottom of the screen for the new drive. Now all I see is a picture of a lock. What's that?? please help me fix my comp I'm going away next week and wanted to take my comp. Thanks in advance.

[rkawakami]

Can you clarify how you were installing the operating system? By that I mean which program you were using (if any) and what disks are involved (if any). My understanding of reading your other threads was that you were either going to use a cloning program or an IBM restore disk set. As far as the picture of a lock goes, does it look like any of these:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-59377

(Note: a T20 supervisor [aka, BIOS] password will look like a power-on password; there's only a squarish-box displayed, not a cartoon person.)

[Jaye]

When I started the computer I had the windows xp installed and yes this is the exAct same lock I saw on my computer. I do not have a BIOS code.

[rkawakami]

There's two types of lock displays for the T20: 1) a picture of a lock with a "drum" next to it and 2) a picture of a lock with a "square". The first is a hard drive password; the second could be a power-on password or supervisor (BIOS) password. The only one which might have suddenly appeared out of nowhere would be the supervisor password. This may have been installed by an owner previous to you. It's also something which, due to the rules of this forum, we cannot discuss any techniques or methods to break into the system.

[Jaye]

Can I resolve my issue by purchasing the reboot disk that was mentioned earlier? If so, do you provide rush delivery? How many days minimum before I recieve it? Thanks in advance.

[RealBlackStuff]

Just trying to re-install from recovery disks (or any other media) will not work if your T20 has a Supervisor Password (SVP).