IBM Thinkpad R40 2683

Hi, just collected my friends laptop from him. He was about to throw it away but i said I would take a look before he did this.

The machine is not booting into windows the only thing that it is doing is hanging with the windows logo for a long time followed by a message about a corrupted file I will post this when able to.

I have been trying to format his harddrive for him but when I try to boot from his windows cd a whole load of text appears mentioning his partition followed by a blue screen with a checksum warning.

I know that from reading the forums in the past that checksums usually mean a problem with the harddrive.

In short, I am unable to format the harddrive and do clean install.

Do I have a hardware problem or a problem with the windows cd that i am trying to use.

Can anyone recomend best way to format and do clean install.

It seems a shame because the machine is turning on fine and I recently upgraded his Ram.

Any ideas greatly appreciated. Thanks, Sam.

 

Hi all, got a bit of an update, while trying to turn the machine on it suddenley died. Have plugged into mains and tried to turn on again without success. No lights appearing at all on machine, I am sure socket is working. Is this the end of the road for the machine or can I yet rescue it.
:cry