IBM T21

[sadelste]

I bought a used IBM T21 and was upgrading the operating system from NT4 to Windows 2000. The upgrade did not work, so I wanted to re-load NT4. Unfortunately, the supervisor password is preventing me from booting from a CD. I tried to format the hard drive so that I could boot from it and then use the cd rom drive. After formatting the hard drive and transferring the system to it I now have a blank hard drive that I cannot boot with. I am really in need, because I need the laptop for my business.

I appreciate any help you might provide.

 

[Rentvillas]

Ok so you wiped your Hard Drive? You cant boot to a blank hard drive. So you have to go into your BIOS and look for the boot order. Make your CDROM drive the first device on your boot list. After that just restart your computer, put your prefered OS into your CDROM drive and press any key to boot to CD....

 

[sadelste]

I am not able to boot from the CD ROM, The bios has been set up to only allow booting from either the hard drive or a removable floppy. The bios has disabled booting from an ATAPI CD ROM

 

[Rentvillas]

Then try to get your hands on a bootable floppy. Boot it to a prompt and then try executing the setup file on the CDROM

 

[Hungster]

Warning, those IBM systems are funny, you will discover some device might not work, ie Sound and parallel ports

 

[sadelste]

I am not able to use both the cd rom drive and the floppy drive. Since they both go into the same ultra bay and they are not hot swappable. If I use a floppy to boot up it will not see the CD ROM drive, becasue both can not be there at the same time. I need to figure out a way to boot from the har drive similarly to booting from a startup floppy

 

[Rentvillas]

And your sure that youve copied all the necessary boot files to your HDD?

 

[Hungster]

oh ya, some older cdrom will not boot to read bootable cds

just use a newer one

 

[sadelste]

I have now corrected the problem and here is what I did. I did an FDISK and removed an NTFS partition. Then I formatted my hard drive. Then I copied the startup files from my Windos 98 startup floppy to my hard drive. Once I booted up using the hard drive I was able to access the CD ROM drive to install the operating system. I want to thank all of you for your responses.

Steve