So I bought a laptop from this guy at work for $200 (I know, I told him he was stupid too). It’s an IBM ThinkPad 365XD. This is a friend of mine, so I know he’s on the up and up, etc…
Anyway, I got it home after he erased all of his stuff and for some reason it was still showing 99% of the C drive to be taken up. When I would try to download my stuff onto it, it would always say “not enough disk space”. Well nothing was showing on the C drive and I even went so far as to add up all of the “basic” files on it such as Microsoft Word and all that stuff. It didn’t even come close to what it was saying was on there.
So (perhaps foolishly), I formatted the C drive. Yes, that’s right, I did things to a computer that I’ve never done before and I hope I never have to again. I felt like I was killing it, but I really just wanted to erase everything and start over. After all, he has the Windows 98 CD and all the Microsoft software so I could just add all that stuff back onto it. What could the harm be?
Well, the harm be that now it doesn’t even recognize that it has a C drive, only the A drive. And I found a floppy disk inside the bag he gave me that is labeled “Universal Boot Disk”. Okay, great… plop it in, run it, it says “Thanks for buying a Gateway 2000 computer”. What the hell? As far as I know, Gateway and IBM have nothing to do with each other. Anyway, then it asks what kind of C drive I have but the only options are Gateway products. So I choose “No Gateway C drive” but then when I put Windows 98 in there it says “Can’t read because you chose no Gateway C drive”.
So tell me, did I just screw myself into wasting $200 or is there a way to get my hands on the correct “Universal Boot Disk” or maybe some other way to go about this? I know there are a lot of computer-savvy people here. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Shouldn’t be any problem to reinstall an O/S on this machine. I’ve done the same to a 380ED with help from the IBM product support site. Go to http://www.ibm.com, follow the Support & Downloads link at the top center of the page. Look next in the body of the page for a link to ThinkPad - this takes you to a page where you select your specific machine. You will need to know your precise model - it should be on the label on the bottom of the computer - look at the available options in the pulldowns to see what to look for. When I redid my ThinkPad about a year ago everything was still available.
Anyone with Windows reading this: to spare yourself this nonsense, immediately get out a diskette, then do the following:
My Computer
Control Panel
Add/remove programs
Startup disk
Then you’ll have something to restart your machine when you feel the need to type format c: or even to work through a serious disk crash; virus; or whatever.
It sounds like you deleted the partiton and not just formatted the drive. Per Mooney252 you need to create a startup disk but make sure you create it on a Win98 machine and not a WinME machine as ME handles formatting and setup a bit differently. The IBM BIOS seup has a diagnostic panel where you can check the status of the drive with respect to the machine realizing it has a drive onboard…
FWIW the seller is not “nuts”. The 200 you paid for a 5 year old P120-133 notebook with a 1.3 gig hard drive and 16-40 megs of RAM is more than I would have given him given the relatively limited utility of the machine with current apps. It's really a Win 95 class machine and would be happiest with Win 95 installed. It will huff and puff running many 98 apps and IE will bring it to it's knees. You can get 1.3 -2 gig drives for 10. or so on Ebay if the drive is flaking out.