ok, Im at a loss. I promised my sister I would try to get this thing running. Next time I'll keep my mouth shut. I have an IBM Thinkpad 380d. When she gave it to me, the CD rom was fried, so she bought a new CD rom for it. At the same time she bought a 30 gig HDD and a 128 meg memory chip to put in it. According to what I read, it is all supposed to be compatible with the 380d. First and foremost, after installing all the parts, I cant get the dang thing to boot up now, even with a win 98 startup disk created on my desktop, it goes thru the memory check and then I have a blank screen with a flashing cursor in upper left corner. Floppy drive and cdrom both spin and check out ok on the bios test page. The boot floppy works fine on my desktop. What am I forgetting here. Figured the HDD needs partitioned and all that, but with the boot disk not working I cant acess the Fdisk program. Another problem Im having is with the memory chip, but that is secondary. with the add on memory, the machine doesnt recognize it, and will give a memory error in the bios test...exact messages are: DEV 002 ERR 83 FRU 2010 Any help out there for me, or did she waste a couple hundred bucks on this thing?

I don't know but I can tell you this: First, do you have, or have you downloaded the user and "hardware maintenance" manuals from IBM support? They are indispensible. If you haven't post back and I'll try and find the link. Next, all Thinkpads I've had, including the old 75xx series, my old 36xx series, my 380xd I had, and my current 600X--ALL will post to the "setup" (bios) screen with NO floppy, NO CDROM, and NO hard drive, as well as NO memory installed. ANY thinkpad I've worked on will boot to a floppy with no hdd installed. I do believe, however, that you have to select the proper boot order in the bios/setup. By the way, do you know the procedure for that? Now 'far as the CDROM, what (if any) are you trying to use to boot it? These drives will NOT read some older "home burned" cd's or RW cd's. If you are testing the CDROM, make SURE you use a "factory" made CD in there, and make SURE that the CD is actually bootable. I believe those errors are listed in the hardware manual. Again, post back if you can't find it.

yeah, I have no problem getting to the Bios/setup screen. I set the boot order to floppy-hdd-cdrom. I hadnt been able to find the maintenance manual, definitely been poring over IBM site though. I have been trying to boot with a startup disk I created on my desktop. as far as the cd, that may be a problem, as I am using a CDR of my windows 98, but even without it in, it wont boot with the floppy. the cdrom is a 20x model, brand new, dont know if it will read cdr or not.

The error message you are getting indicates a ram problem. Either it is not installed correctly or it is the wrong type for the computer. Try reseating the ram. If that does not work, try putting the old lot back. It's usually safer to replace one item at a time and then test if it's ok. That way you will immediately know the cause of any problems.

unfortunately, I cannot find the old chip I took out, but it has 16 meg hardwired in, so I pulled the new chip out. Still wont boot though

If you continue to have problems, enter the bios and look for a 'Reset configuration' option and turn it on.

under the configuration menu in the bios/setup, there is an initialize selection, and Ive already tried that. Is there a reset somewhere else? Is the 16 meg onboard not enough to boot it?