Hi there. I recently got an IBM thinkpad from a friend, for free, but I have a problem.

I charged it for 5 days (using a different powercord, from a printer I believe, the orignal one got lost), and when I turn it on, it doesn't boot up. It shows a pixelated floppy disk and for me to press F1. When I press F1, after about 30 seconds I get the numbers i990305.

I don't know the operating system, or the specs, but I'm guess it has Windows98 because the sticker says so. My friend says they dont know anything about it, and I'm not too fond with IBM's. I thought about booting it with a bootup disk, but it doesn't have a floppy disk drive/input for one, just cdrom.

Anybody know how to help?

You might try a Windows 98 se boot cd. The following site has the ISO file of one available for download. You will have to copy the ISO file to a different computer with a CD burner and a CD burning prograzm that handles ISOs. The result will be a boot CD which contains the same programs as a Boot floppy. Note that this site needs to be in wide or full screen mode to show the text.

http://www.allbootdisks.com/index.p...

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IBM Error Codes:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...

Looks like you have no Operating System Installed.................

The rest of the support start pages for this machine. IBM/now Lenovo has some of the very best online support of anyone

You may also have a hard drive hardware problem, but the first step is to try and read it with a floppy, run fdisk and select option 4 "view hard drive details" or whatever that says.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...

orbital is on the right track.

Put a bootable CD in the CDROM drive and so long as the CDROM is first in the BIOS boot order it should boot from the CDROM.

If that works then you just need to use a bootable win98 CDROM and boot from that. Once booted use fdisk to check if the hard drive can be seen and partitioned. Partition the disk (if not already partitioned) and intall the OS onto the hard drive. You do not need a floppy drive in that case.

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