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 ;D :-[

If only they had put something on the screen such as "press <insert key here> for setup," life would be so much easier.

In fact, they could get rid of the ridiculous logo screen and actually show the BIOS's output, so you could actually see if it was working.

But oh well.


Have you tried Ctrl+Alt+Esc?
F1? F2?

So you can't pull out the floppy drive and shove in the CD-ROM without rebooting? That's too bad, as Smart Boot Manager will let you boot off the CD from a floppy, but not if you have to reboot first...

EDIT: https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=computers_for_beginners;action=disp lay;num=1068148092;start=0