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: