Old thinkpad 380XD

[jifjaf]

I've been given an old IBM Thinkpad 380XD. Everything has been erased from the HDD, & it’s been fdisk-ed & formatted. There’s no recovery partition & no discs with it.

I'm trying to install Win 98SE & I've changed the BIOS settings so it should boot from the CD, but the CD doesn’t seem to be recognised. I guess the drivers are gone. It does have a FDD, but I'm not sure what I need, that’ll fit on a floppy, to get it to boot from the CD. I tried the boot disks from here but it didn’t like them, even though they include IDE CDrom drivers.

Any advice on what to do & where to download..........whatever. much appreciated.

TIA

 

[jifjaf]

Edit by OP:

the "here" in my post was meant to be a link to this page - http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

jifjaf

 

[deathengine]

try hitting f11 or f12 during boot to see if it will give you a boot menu. That is an OLD laptop. Will really chug along. Those came with pentium 233 or so MHZ processors and 16BM ram if you are lucky

 

[jifjaf]

IBM Thinkpad 380XD
Intel Mobile Pentium II 233MHz
96MB EDO RAM (32MB onboard, 64MB RAM module)

@deathengine: F11 & F12 both give an error message with an option to test components - testing CD drive didn't show anything. As I wrote before, I changed the boot order in the BIOS so I don't think it's that; I think it's drivers.

 

[deathengine]

Got a USB cd drive that you can test with? It could be drivers, but i would lean more towards an issue with the CD drive itself. The windows boot floppy should have loaded a proper driver when you attempted that. Thats what leads me to believe the drive might be bad.
That win 98 cd is bootable?

 

[jifjaf]

I know for a fact that the CD’s working fine – the guy that gave me the laptop had it working last week, it’s only since he erased the HDD to make sure that all sensitive data was wiped that it’s a problem/

Any other suggestions anyone? Please?

 

[markibm]

try hitting f11 or f12 during boot to see if it will give you a boot menu. That is an OLD laptop. Will really chug along. Those came with pentium 233 or so MHZ processors and 16BM ram if you are lucky

Not a solution, but is it possible that you can have a 32mb RAM, or will it of had to be upgraded? And, i just bought one for 50p, and it has Windows 95 on it, so try windows 95 instead of 98, as it requires less Processer power (I think) Please od not have a go at me for spelling things wrong or getting things wrong, i am only 13.