Hello everyone.

I'm VERY new to forums so please bear with me as I will undoubtebly irritate a few with my lack of proper forum ettiquette and never-ending paragraphs... my humble apologies if I offend ...

I recently acquired an old 1GHz IBM Thinkpad Laptop (not sure exactly what make and can't seem to find anywhere that tells me) but then recently It had been infected with a trojan which eventually
I then decided "right, time for the good old formatting technique"... using my original Win98 CD, I proceeded to try format the hard drive but when the time came for the actual formatting it would give a new error straight away saying:

"Error
Setup cannot install windows 98 on your computer.
An error was detected while formatting your primary hard disk partition.
* Press ENTER to quit Setup."

After that things got worse as then when I booted up normally from the hard drive it gave the following messages:

"Intel Base Code, PXE-2.1 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2001, Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-MDF: Exiting Intel PXE ROM
Operating System not found"

Since then I have gone into fdisk and deleted, and then created again, a new primary partition (seeings it is the only partition taking up the full 100%, it says that it is already set to being active).
This, to my immense frustration, has not helped as when I try to start Win98 setup again it simply displays the previous "unable to format" error message straight away now (sigh).

Also, I am unable to the use the format command when in DOS as when I say:

A:\> format c:
Bad command or file name

(A: has got all the normal startup files - not sure how they got there because I don't have a floppy drive - but to be honest this has always been an issue of mine as I constantly forget how to use DOS properly... and I'm not exactly "expert" in computer maintanence)

PLEASE HELP ME!! I've been trying to find a similar problem on this forum and others but none have seemed to fix my specific problem and I don't want to through away the hard drive yet... I'm losing hair over this!! :eek:

Is it a thinkpad R30? I have one!

Its HDD should have 1 win9 partition and ahidden one for recovery. you could have hit f11 on bootup to recover in the first ppplace but youve probably killed that with FDISK

Reset all the BIOS settings to default - make sure the boot mode is set to basic (not advanced/in depth) as the whole PXE malarky is to do with network booting.

go into fdisk and kill all the partitions
YOU MUST THEN REBOOT BEFORE FORMATTING IT

It should then install ok

My R3O says on the bottom (black and white sticker - below windows key)

Type 2656 - 64g Serial Number xxxxxxx

If FDISK isn't able to delete the partitons, use the debug command to delete the partitions. Boot to DOS mode from the Windows CD and at the prompt, type 'debug' and press enter. You should now see a hyphen instead of the prompt. Then type the following commands: (Text in Bold is what you need to type out)


-F 200 L1000 0
-A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80

(If you want to delete partitions on the second hard disk, type 81 instead of 80. If you have only one disk, use 80

xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 (Leave this line blank and press the <Enter> key)
-Q

You should then get a message saying "Program terminated successfully". Now, reboot and then use FDISK to create partitions and then try to reinstall Windows.

Hope this helps. Get back to us if you need more help.

hi
i have same problem with compaq presario v6000 laptop
help me please.
thx

same problem as what ,please explain you problem.so WE don't have to read everything in the other post ,all ways best to start your own thread than tag onto a 1 yr old one .