Hey! I'm trying to fix my friends computer and it's on old IBM T21. When I boot it up it shows the "IBM Think Pad" screen. After that it shows a red message saying "Hard drive not installed, if no Operating System found. Re-install Hard Drive...Press Enter". So I tried to install Windows XP and it shows the blue install screen and opens all the files...and then it says "Setup is starting windows" and it just sits there. I tried to re-install the HDD and then windows again. Same thing. I'm pretty sure that I downloaded the right HDD install...Any help?
I'm...not sure what you're asking. The other day I took the hard drive out of the computer and straightened the pins. When I put it back in it made that odd clicking noise that IBM hard drives make. I noticed that more of the lights on the computer worked and there were more sounds however whenever I put any boot CD in there was a boot error. It still didn't recognize the HDD. So I took it out and it let me put the CD's in but still didn't work...I'm thinking about getting a new HDD.
if the hard drive is not seen by the laptops bios then no windows version can load onto it as it won't see the drive either.
Indeed, go into the BIOS - the 'starting windows' part of the install I believe is where xp first starts using the hard drive so that would make sense.
I'm gonna get a new hard drive...it was only 10GB anyways (I have no idea how anybody could live with that). I'm pretty sure though that it's not formatted (thew new one I'm getting). Can I do that through the BIOS?
has to be formated thru dos or thru windows. xp will ask you when you boot of the cd to partition & format the hd.
