I’m giving an old laptop away (thinkpad series 1500). I used a drive eraser to securely remove all data. Now I’m stuck , though in that I can’t reinstall Win98 from the CD copy because the CD-ROM no worky without driver files (!@#$#). Furthermore, I don’t have a Win98 boot disk.
I do have a desktop with a floppy drive running XP if that might help.
Can I create a boot disk with appropriate CDROM driver files from my XP machine? Is there another more elegant solution?
Thanks,
CB
Try here.
Try looking at http://www.cdrom-drivers.com/, like IBM Thinkpad 760EL & others driver - IBM CDROM Drivers - cdtpgdos.exe
Or the official IBM download site at http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-488QAL
You should be able to download the drivers you need.
But it might be easier to create a boot disk on your XP system, which will have basic drivers for a CD reader. Then download & install the official ones.
Does your laptop have a floppy drive? If it does, then you can use the bootdisk from the bootdisk.com site that QED linked to. You’ve probably got an ATAPI compatible CD ROM, which a generic boot disk can handle.
If it doesn’t have a floppy drive, then check the settings of your laptop to see if it is set to boot from the CD drive. If it will boot from the CD drive, the next thing you need is a bootable Win98 install CD. Not all win98 install CDs are bootable, but most of them are.
Thanks for the suggestions. I made the boot disk and it worked. Now all I need to do is partition the drive, format it, then install Win98.
Surely, I’ll run into another snag. Can I meet you guys here later if I do?
-CB
Sure, but we’ll have to charge you overtime. 
The CD ROM that I *thought *was a Win98 CD turns out is only a Win98 recovery CD. IBM, in its great wisdom, apparently doesn’t want me doing a clean reinstall.
Does it sound like I’m fucked? Any chance of unfucking?
You should still be able to run it using your boot diskette. Boot with the diskette and stick the CD-ROM in the drive. At the A:> prompt, type X: where X is the drive letter of your CD-ROM drive (probably D, unless you have multiple hard drives or a partitioned C drive). At the CD-ROM drive prompt, type DIR and look for something like RECOVER.EXE, SETUP.EXE or INSTALL.EXE or something along those lines. Then run it by typing the filename and hitting <enter>. This CD will restore the hard drive as it came from the factory–pretty much as good as a clean install.
I tried to run recover.exe. The system paused momentarily and then returned to the command prompt.
Are there any other .EXE or .COM files on there? Also see if there’s a README or something which might give you some instructions.
In the main disk directory:
Applications:
DFT4PSG
PRIME
BIN files
BOOTCAT
BOOTIMG
Dat File
ZERO
File
FAT16
FAT32
YES
IMZ File
JGUSMA0 through JGUSMA9
MS-DOS Batch file
DFT
There is a subdirectory called ‘recovery.’ The files therein are as follows:
Application
DISK
FDISK
FMTDRV
PFTO
PHUNZIP
RECOVER
SHOW1
SHOW2
SHOW4
WARN
WSEC11
File
FAT16
FAT32
YES
MS-DOS Application
BSECR
FORMAT
NOPAR
REBOOT
MS-DOS Batch File
RECV1
RECV2
RECV3
RECVR
USRBRK