I have rescently rediscovered an old IBM Thinkpad 770 type 9548 I use to use a long time ago, and went about formatting it and reinstalling everything to give it a fresh start, however it will not let me boot from the cd drive and I had lost the floppy drive for it many many years ago. Is there a particular cd i can use to get to a command prompt to enable me to use a cd to install windows or dos os? I have acquired a usb floppy drive in the hope it would recognise that in the bios but with no luck. Many thanks, hope you can help. -Damien

http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/product.do?template=/productpage/landingpages/productPageLandingPage.vm&brandind=10&familyind=50106&machineind=59601&modelind=0&partnumberind=0&subcategoryind=0&doctypeind=9&doccategoryind=0&validate=true

I have been to that link and have found no help, I will explain my problem further. I have completely formatted the laptop, so when it starts up it says invalid drive when it finds the hd, I would normally use a boot disk in this situation to boot into a dos prompt then, install dos, cd drivers then windows, however I have no floppy drive. I have so far failed to find a cd that I can boot from or even get it to recognise as a valid system disk and am trying to find out how I can install an os or even boot from a cd on the 770 thinkpad, if I am not looking at the right thing at the link you have given please be more specific on what I am to look for. Many thanks for the quick response. -Damien

First question is does your BIO support booting from CD drive?? External parallell like BackPack and USB are usually not supported to my knowledge, it must be a PCMCIA drive?? How did you format without floppy??

I believe looking thru IBM support you do not have the option to use a bootable cd drive, they talk about using a boot floppy! Therefore unless you can take the hard drive out, buy an IDE adapter cable and install a basic DOS system you have I am sorry to say no options except buy a floppy drive. Do you live in the UK? I have a couple of 12" IDE 40pin to Laptop 44pin cables and would be willing to sell one. TGIF nearly time to clock off

The bios does support booting from the cd drive but it wont recognise any cd as bootable. I do live in the UK how much would you want for a 40 pin to 44 pin ide cable? email me at rabbitpoison@yahoo.co.uk and let me know, thanks for the info.

Well I have a Thinkpad 770 too. Mine however is seriously damaged. The peripherals work but my system board is dammaged (error 161, 163, 173 and replacing of battery didnīt help). Since buying a new system board is not a serious option (too expensive) I hope I can find a similar system someday to repair. About your problem: The Thinkpad 770 does support booting from CD. Maybe your CD is not read well. Try to clean it and/or the laser eye from your (Sanyo) CR-ROM player. Good Luck