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Thinkpad won't detect Operating System

J

jim1013

Junior Member
I've got an IBM Thinkpad 570 laptop. Also, it has no built in cdrom or floppy. I also have a connector that allows me to plug in the Laptop hard drive into a desktop computer.

I recently formatted the laptop hard drive, and installed win98se (while the laptop hard drive was in the desktop computer). All was going well, OS setup fine, and could boot while in the desktop. I then transferred the Hard drive back into the laptop, and it came up with messages like 'Operating system not found' or 'disk is not a system disk', etc, etc.

It of course started working again perfectly (booted fine) when back in the desktop. Eventually I used FDISK in the desktop to repartition the drive, and the dos format command in the desktop, then installed win98se , and put the drive back in the laptop

(originally i had used the WinXP diskmanager tools to format it. Note: I did set the active partition and it was in FAT-32)

Now i'm trying to put WinXP on the laptop (mainly for testing purposes), but it says that it cannot find 'ntldr', however if i take the laptop hdd out and plug it into a desktop, it boots fine.

Thats a rundown of what happens. I still cannot get WinXP on there, although I can go through the procedure i did before to get 98 back on there whenever I want. but it would be very handy to get xp on there.

Could anyone elighten me as to why the laptop is so damn sensitive when booting up? If the hdd boots up and detects the OS in a desktop, why should it not work when put back in the laptop?? (as no changes to the files on the hdd are made inbetween).

and if you've got any ideas as to how i can make XP work on there, that would be kinda usefull too.. thanks.
 
You can't do that is the simple answer. It's like swapping motherboards and using the same hard drive with an operating system installed. There are so many different chipsets out there and it just will not work.

Granted yes sometimes this works but not often and not correctly. Also, the install you do is configured for a desktop and not a laptop like you need.
 
Generally (with desktops) i can swap a hard drive over to another computer (regardless of if its a Win9X or a Win XP OS) and it will still boot up. once windows starts it will take a while to work out that there are different chipsets.


but the main point is why does a laptop have all these issues with detecting an OS on it's hdd, and what can be done about that to make it more compliant? I've never swapped a hard drive that has a bootable OS on it to another desktop and had it say that there is no OS on there!
 
Thinkpads of that generation have always been designed to work only with a properly functioning CDR and floppy drive if oyu want all the appropriate drivers added. Windows XP doesn't much like 300 MHz laptops anyway. Spring for a Thinkpad CDR and a ultrabay. Total cost under $45. Then install it properly.
 
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