Hello,
I have an IBM laptop computer (Type 2656) and the system board crashed so I lost all my info. I have insurance so I sent it to get fixed. My problem is that since IBM places their recovery information on a partitioned part of my hard drive... I now do not have it. My hard drive has been reformatted and partitioned but I have no operating system. I have an XP professional operating system CD but I can't load it on to my laptop. The kind of laptop I have has a bay for either your floppy drive or your CD rom drive. For some reason it will only read the floppy drive when I put it in, but not the CD rom. Hence my dilema... I have a boot disk and it loads the drivers temporarily while I have the floppy drive in, but as soon as I swap and reboot (which you need to do in order for the bay to read the drive) then the CD ROM drive becomes an invalid drive. I thought I could get into the bios and force it to read from the CD ROM drive, but I can't get into that either. I reboot and pressed ESC, F10, DEL, well all that I could press) none work. What should I do? SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE

I created a CD with the Windows install files and all necessary boot files on it. Thus, I am able to boot from CD and install the operating system as well from that CD. If you go this route, be sure to check setup and make sure your CD is in the list of bootable devices.

First of all, try Ctrl+Alt+Esc to try and get into the BIOS. If that doesn't work, try pressing random keys all over the keyboard...

If that doesn't work...


:)...

Okay, I have a "crazy idea." :) This may or may not work for you, and it may just make things worse. :) It also will involve writing data to the beginning of your hard drive, so whatever is there will be certainly destroyed. I have never done this before, although I have done something similar on an old desktop, but with a different boot manager, but it's the same concept. I have no idea whether this will work or not. If it doesn't work, it will make things worse. It might make the laptop burst into flames ;D. You have been warned. :) ;D

Please read everything first, so you know what I'm suggesting. :)

Okay...

1) Download this disk image:
http://www.toms.net/rb/

2) Now write it to a floppy... take a look at the install instructions. Of course the best way to create it is on a gnu/linux machine, (or possibly(?) another *nix), but if you haven't got one, try using DOS/win95/win98/winME. I haven't done it under windows/DOS, so I don't know what problems you may or may not run into. :) If all you have is winNT/2000/XP, then it will be difficult, involving possibly burning a CD with the files inside the zip file, and then booting with a DOS floppy, removing the DOS floppy, and then writing the image on the CD to a blank floppy. See more information here: http://not.toms.net/twiki/bin/view/Tomsrtbt/CreateTomsrtbtFromWin2000
This is probably the hardest part if you don't have old windows or gnu/linux (or possibly(?) another *nix).
EDIT: Nevermind! Take a look at: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite.htm

Note, you'll need a perfect floppy, that means NO bad sectors, or it will fail. I usually go through about four or five disks before I get one that actually works. Then again, my disks are all over five years old. :)

3) Now download sbootmgr.dsk from here:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9.1/isolinux/sbootmgr
Just save the file to a different blank formatted floppy.

4) Okay, now comes the fun part. Put the tomsrtbt floppy in your floppy drive and reboot. Now as long as you don't run into some incredibly bad luck, it should boot up. Now it will prompt you for a keyboard map, qwerty (US) is the default, so if you have that just press enter.
Now you'll get a login prompt.
Login as:


login: root
password: xxxx

Note when you type the password, no letters will actually show up, that's just security at work.

Here comes the point of no return. Once you do this, you've made permanent modifications to your partition table, so...
Now induce

fdisk
That will start up gnu/linux fdisk, a not very friendly partitioning program. Too bad cfdisk isn't on the disk, that would make things a lot easier. Anyway, create a tiny (say 5 mb or so) primary partition at the beginning of your hard drive and make it bootable, and write the changes.

Now type


reboot

and the system will reboot.
Leave the floppy in the drive.

Wait for the floppy to boot up again, select your keyboard map, and login as root again.


5) Now here's the next fun part. :) Remove the tomsrtbt floppy and put in the floppy with the smart boot manager image on it. Now execute the following commands:


mkdir /mnt/floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
cd /mnt/floppy
dd if=sbootmgr.dsk of=/dev/hda1
cd /
umount /mnt/floppy
halt


What this does is write the image to that new harddisk partition of yours. We're pretending it's a floppy disk, so when you boot from the hard drive, you should get the same results as if you had booted from a smart boot manager floppy. I have no idea whether it will work or not.
The "halt" command tells it that you are done, and want to shut off the system.

6) Now wait for the thing to turn itself off. If it doesn't turn itself off automatically, wait for it to display "power down" and hit the power switch. Remove the floppy, and attach your cd drive with the windows cd in it. Now turn on the system.

7) Okay, if everything worked you should be soon looking at a menu allowing you to boot from a bunch of devices. Choose CDROM and press enter. It will ask you whether you want to save changes (I have no idea what that is supposed to mean), so just press "n" when you see that prompt.

Okay, now you should have your cd booting up. If not... well... I did say it might not work... :)

When you are installing windows, be sure to delete all partitions and make new windows partitions. DO NOT let it reboot your laptop until it finishes installing, or else you'll be back in the same situation you were in before...


If you need any help with the above long list of stuff, post your question here and I'll try to answer it. :)


I really hope this helps you out...

Good luck, :) ;D :)
~psi42