Laptop problem

[lasher45]

I have an old IBM Thinkpad model 2653 (Pentium 2 processor and heavy as a brick) that I've been trying to reformat. It had an XP trial version on it so when the 30 day period was up I would just reformat again. Finally I stopped and left it lying around for a year or two, now I'm just trying to get it running again.

The thing is, it won't boot up or anything. I went into the BIOS and changed the boot sequence to boot of the win98 disk I have, I just get a picture of a floppy telling to insert one and press f1. So then I found the win95 floppy and tried booting off of that but I get a message that says something along the lines of "I/O error, please re-insert disk and press any key to try again" If I try loading off the HDD then I get an error screen that prompts me to test different systems, motherboard, processor etc...they all came back OK. I can't get into the command prompt and only the BIOS.

People have told me to press the "blue thinkpad button" while starting, too bad the things too old to have one. Is there anyway I can get win98/95 on there or reformat it without the command prompt or the disks loading?

[<DRS>GPF]

hmm... perhaps you could put the harddrive into another laptop, then load win98, then replace it back into yours..

remember to copy all of the CAB files into a file folder, so when you boot up and windows starts asking for the disk again, you can just point it to the CAB files needed.


do you have an actual 98 cd?

you might try putting the win95 floppy into another known good PC, and perform a surface scan.
windows will attempt to correct the disk errors.. hopefully theres not too many sector errors, which if there is, there may not be enough room remaining on the disk for windows to create new files to replace the errored ones.