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Hello;
I've been trying to find a way to get my ThinkPad 760XL to boot from the CD-ROM drive. ibm.com is completely unhelpful, nor can I find anything useful by way of Google.
Is there a BIOS patch, configuration utility, work-around, etc., that will let this thing boot from a bootable CD in the ThinkPad standard internal CD-ROM drive? By this, I don't mean an autoboot system like that which is included in most Linux dstributions - I need to actually boot from the CD-ROM drive at power-up.
Thanks.
Follow-up:
I tried fooling the system by switching the boot sequence to use HDD-2 first, thinking that this is mapped to the IDE CD-ROM (judging by IBM's brain-dead DOS system config disk, it should be). This generated an I9990301 error. Ditto for HDD-3 and HDD-4.
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I had a ThinkPad 760L which I flashed the BIOS into the newer 98 version of it (not knowing the dangers of it).
Well, the one thing that I want to know is: WHY THE HELL DID THEY PUT SO MANY HDD OPTIONS???? I had the hardest time to get things switched around?
Of course that ThinkPad is all smitherines now...
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>Why not switch the boot to CD instead of the 4 IDE hard drives?
Wish I could. The 'Easy Setup' BIOS system has boot options for four (!) hard drives, PCMCIA, network, FDD, but no CD-ROM option. I tried booting off of all four HDD options, but none of them map to the CD-ROM.
From what I can tell, the BIOS doesn't recognize the CD-ROM as a valid boot device. What I'm looking for is a BIOS flash that patches this, a work-around that has the same effect, etc., that would enable the CD-ROM as a valid boot device.
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I'm having EXACTLY the same difficulty with my Thinkpad 760El, so I know how frustrated you are. Any luck finding a solution? How about we advise one another if either of us comes up with one? Pooling our resources would be really helpful. Thanks. --Dave.
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Trying to get a 760EL to recognize and external floppy. It recognizes the built in cd.
Also have no idea what an APM driver is [I get a dialog box that says my mouse may not work]
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I have a 760ed in my shop right now running Doze 95 and my client wants 98 on it. BIOS gives NO option to allow cd-rom as boot device. I thought one of the floppy drive icons could be placed in bios setup as startup device and then it would find ms-dos 6.22 boot partition i made on a cd. No luck yet.
Thank you IBM !!! You guys are so smart !!!
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To fix the no cd recognition on a 760xl, I bought a docking station and base (with cd) on ebay. did the trick. the problem i am having is a hard drive that is not being recognized. how do you low level format a drive that the comp doesnt find? how do you enter bios or cmos on this thing?
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I have checked the hard drive and bios of my 760 and I am unable to get this machine to boot up into windows or from windows and Linux boot disks. It dies shortly after displaying first screen upon booting. I'm using ac power adapter becuase the battery is dead. Possible motherboard issue??
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Spike and Strange,
I used to own the 760 and had the same problems when trying to install win98. I have a swappable floppy and cdrom, and everytime I used a boot floppy, my cd-rom would be useless, when I swap in the cd-rom, there is no option to boot from it! Stupid ass IBM. I was able to fix my problem by creating a boot floppy in windows 98 that has cd-rom drivers, and copy it onto drive C. Modify the parameters of the boot file to look into drive C for drivers instead of drive A. At least now, I could boot up my laptop with my cd-rom active as drive D and could start my setup.exe from the win98 CD. You might even be able to fix the issue by getting a pcmcia cd-rom drive, with correct drivers. Good luck.
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If any of you guys are still having problems trying to install new OS's into the IBM 760 computer because you couldn't get the swappable floppy and cdrom to be recognized at the same time (I don't think you should even use this laptop anymore.... for under $400, you should be able to find a decent thinkpad 600 in ebay!). Go to ebay a grab one of those 760 external floppy drives from IBM. They're going anywhere from $10-$20 and plug into the back of your laptop. This will enable you to boot anything. DO NOT get one of those PCMCIA cdroms, they'll cause you more headaches. Good luck!
-Dennis
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I have an IBM 760EL and am trying to install Mandrake Linux 8.2 and am having the same problem......I hate those fU@@ers at IBM. If anybody comes up with anything, let me know. I have a docking station but it doesn't have any drives in it.
Thanks
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I created an empty directory on the computer called "Win98", copied the entire Windows 98SE CDROM (for computers without operating systems) into the directory, rebooted to the command prompt, deleted Windows 95 and Program Files, and installed 98 from there. No problems. Didn't think it would work, but it did..
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