IBM Thinkpad

[Bashar]

I hope this is in the right area.

Here is the deal... my bro has a Thinkpad T40 and the HD is freaking out. We bought a new HD and installed it, thinking I have XP so no troubles installing it. He does not have a CD drive, he has a DVD drive that reads CD's but its labled DVD. So I am thinking that it uses software in the OS and its not working without a OS. In the bios I set it to boot from the CD drive but it wont read the CD. I even tried it with my NT cd and it still wont boot. I was wondering the best way to get XP on a new HD.
I was thinking of getting one of these
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=309780&pfp=SEARCH

and putting a cd-drive in it for the cd or a floppy drive and use the XP floppy boot-up disks. I see I can set the bios to boot from a external source, if I hook that using the USB will it boot up that way?

Or anyone know a better way, he really does not want to spend more money on this.

**EDIT** I know using XP on more then one computer is a no-no we are going to use his key# its on the botom of the computer. And we tried my times to install XP with the IBM recovery program but something is wrong with the drive.

[FTC]

Hi,

I´ve got a T40 and it definetly has no problems at all booting from the CD/DVD or CDRW unit, as long as you set up the boot sequence properly in BIOS. I do this all the time.

However, and if your old drive is NOT broken yet, I really recommend that you get an external USB2 enclosure, put the old drive in, and transfer your preloaded XP installation to the new drive, because you will get all of the specific T40 software also. You can do this with any partition manager such as partition magic, drive image, ghost, or similar You can also (paying a small fee) get the preloaded sw image CDs from IBM so that you can install the preloaded sw from CDs.

Regards
FTC

[Xaotic]

As FTC said, change the boot order in the BIOS. To get there, hit F1 while booting, then go down to Startup, enter select Boot and enter again. F5 and F6 change the boot order of highlighted devices.

I also strongly recommend using a drive image program. The key codes on the bottom of those units are for manufacturing only and the codes will not work with Retail version disks.

F11 from the boot will have options to recover the factory image, provided the drive is still good.