IBM Thinkpad 760EL BIOS

I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop on Ebay and it came with no OS. I have my own copies of Win95 and 98 but can't get puter to boot from either of them. Was told to make sure that CD was "first boot" on startup but can't figure how to do this. I can get to the BIOS but can't find a sequence move, button, order, lineup or whatever.

 

It has to be in there. Check under something like Advanced BIOS Options. Or under Startup Sequence.

 

Also, Windows 95 CDs will not boot. And I believe only Windows 98SE CDs boot. So unless you have Windows 98SE, you will need to make a floppy boot disk or a bootable CD with floppy emulation and Windows 95/98 on it.

 

I was always under the impression that "all" Win disks were bootable.

 

No, everything Windows 98SE and later is. (Win2k, WinXP) But not Win95 or Win98 (pre-Second Edition).

 

I had that problem with an IBM 760 series laptop, where I could not get my cdrom to operate because I had wiped the drive. It is true that the laptop can boot from the cdrom buit without a cdrom driver installed the bios can not call on the cdrom to boot. i had to install a base os that can be done through a set of floppies. praise god for dos 6.22. you have install does 6.22 as your base os, then install a atapi cdrom driver to get the cdrom to open and run. from there you should be able to boot from cdrom and install something more.

 

you can try this

 

"I had that problem with an IBM 760 series laptop, where I could not get my cdrom to operate because I had wiped the drive. It is true that the laptop can boot from the cdrom buit without a cdrom driver installed the bios can not call on the cdrom to boot. i had to install a base os that can be done through a set of floppies. praise god for dos 6.22. you have install does 6.22 as your base os, then install a atapi cdrom driver to get the cdrom to open and run. from there you should be able to boot from cdrom and install something more."

Huh? If the BIOS doesn't support booting from the CD-ROM, then you just need a boot disk. You don't need to install DOS before you can install Windows.

 

now, as I'm trying to recall exactly why i did it that way to put WinMe on the hd, I think the issue was that I couldn't get it to necessarily boot from cdrom but i know that with the atapi installed i could at least open the cdrom and view it and run the auto run for the install. now the problem was that i could not boot into the atapi driver on the floppy, the floppy i had was just a driver for the cdrom. so therefore, there is no os of any sort to boot into which is why i installed dos from 3 floppies. then i could boot into an os and then insert the floppy and run the atapi setup for the cdrom, this would allow me to then install WinMe. The only draw back is that dos only allows for a 2 gig partition, which meant that I had to add a second partition for the remaining space on the hd. I installed WinMe os & future updates on the primary partition and everything else went into the second partition.

 

two more things i should mention as i continue to recall, remembering that the hd was wiped clean. and the boot disk with the generic atapi would not work for the specific cdrom on the ibm thinkpad (if i recall, i think it was a samsung, cant remember) i had to go get a specific driver for it. generic atapis would ot work.