Trying to install win98 on ibm thinkpad

David717 · #1 January 16th, 2003, 03:45 AM

Help!! I am trying to install win98 or win2000 on an IBM Thinkpad that a friend gave me. I used fdisk to delete partitions, and reformat the hard drive. I have the win98 cd in when I turn the thinkpad on but instead of starting install it tells me "Invalid System Disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key." What did I do wrong?? Any help is greatly appreciated.

David

jdc2000 · #2 January 16th, 2003, 04:01 AM

Hi. Welcome to CTH.

I think some additional information might be helpful.

Are you booting from a floppy diskette, or are you trying to boot from the CD-ROM drive? What boot sequence is set in the BIOS? Does the BIOS allow booting from the CD-ROM drive? Does this laptop have both a floppy drive and a CD-ROM drive built into it, or are the drives either external or swappable? Do you have a Windows 98 boot diskette? If not, you can get on from http://www.bootdisk.com

David717 · #3 January 16th, 2003, 04:10 AM

I have to swap between the floppy and the cd-rom. When I first got the laptop it had dos installed. I was able to insert win98 in cd and it started the install. I then upgraded to win2000 but instead of overlaying win 98 I intalled a clean copy of win 2000. I then thought that to get rid of the old win 98 I would just fdisk and reformat and then re-install win 2000 but now it doesn't recognize the win 98 cd. You have to excuse me, I'm new to this.

I can boot from a win 98 boot disk(floppy) that I got from bootdisk.com. I'm not sure how to get to the bios on the laptop to see what the boot sequence is. I'm assuming that the system does allow booting from the cd-rom because it did it before.

Thanks for your help!!

jdc2000 · #4 January 16th, 2003, 04:57 AM

You have at least 2 options.

1. You can boot from the floppy drive and install enough system files onto the hard drive to boot from that. If your hard drive has been fdisked and formatted, and you have SYS.COM on the boot diskette, simply type SYS from an A:> prompt. Otherwise, use the format program to install the system files:

format c: /s

Then, you can copy the driver files needed to access your CD-ROM drive in DOS mode to the hard drive and create some edited copies of your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files with the drive references edited to point to files on the hard disk instead of on the floppy, so your CD-ROM drive will be accessible in DOS mode. Then, swap drives to the CD-ROM and you should be able to boot from the hard drive with CD-ROM access and install Windows.

2. Go into the BIOS setup and look for the setting for boot order, and set it to boot from the CD-ROM drive. If that works, you can install Windows from the CD.

David717 · #5 January 16th, 2003, 05:22 AM

Thanks for your help!!!

CherisPlace · #6 September 8th, 2005, 11:59 PM

I have virtually the same problem except I'm trying to install Windows 98SE and getting the same error. I started a separate thread but haven't had any response yet. My problem is a bit different in that this Thinkpad has no floppy drive. However, it does seem to be looking for an o/s on the cd/dvd drive. Can I download the boot disk from here and load it on a Cd instead of a floppy then follow the same directions?