Thinkpad install problems

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

I'm trying to install Debian on a Thinkpad 760C.  It booted fine with
tomsrtbt which I used to backup the hard drive just in case (used
dd to dump an image of the whole thing onto an NFS share).  Then I
booted with the debian rescue disk and installed.  (There are 3 drivers
disks in 2.2 now... geez.)  After I installed LILO, the Thinkpad lost
the ability to boot from a floppy, or the hard drive, either one.  With
tomsrtbt, the Debian rescue disk, or a DOS disk, it just sits there 
spinning the floppy indefinitely but not actually booting.  In retrospect
I suspect I should've left a DOS partition on there and used loadlin,
because maybe the MBR is "special" in some way.  But now I can't boot
with a DOS disk to do fdisk /mbr and put it back.  Arrggh.  If I remove
the Thinkpad's hard drive, it will then boot off the floppy.  Also I got
a couple of disk images from IBM's web site, one for a BIOS update and
also a diagnostics disk, that both boot OK, even with the hard drive
installed.  They appear to use DOS.  Now if I just had an fdisk.exe to
go with whatever version of DOS those use...  Is there some kind of 
"universal" freeware version of fdisk that can restore the MBR?

The hard drive is sealed in a special caddy so I'm reluctant to open
it up, but I could do that if I have to, and then install the drive into
another machine and fix it there.

Any other ideas?


-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
 __) | | \________________________________________________________________
Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903