Thinkpad install problems

[Art Wagner]

Shawn,
Sounds like the bios on your Thinkpad may be set to C: A:
sequence. If you can get to
the bios setup and set the boot sequence to A: C: it should then
boot from floppy
if that's really the problem. I have a dos boot diskette that
will do "fdisk /mbr"
if you need it. Let me know via a post and I'll get it to you
somehow.
Art

"Shawn T. Rutledge" wrote:
> 
> 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
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