[RESOLVED] F Disk

[Tonto]

Bought a used lap top
IBM Thinkpad 365XD,P120 , 24 MB RAM,
Active Matrix
In order remove old info and start new I decided to f-disk then format.
When I did f-disk, I deleted partition and was instructed to now reboot in order to format.
When I rebooted, all I got was:
The IBM Think Pad logo flashes on (upper right)with the numbers 24192kb (upper left) then it all disappears.
Then "19990305" (upper left) and a blinking cursor directly below it, but I can type nothing,even when I boot with my win 95 startup disk in the floppy, or installation disk in cd.
My floppy seams to be reading the win 95 boot up disk.
Any suggestions?

[houseisland]

Hi. Forgive me if this seems too obvious, but, when you F-Disked the HDD, did you put a new primary partition on the disk and make it the active partition?

I have only ever worked with a very small number of IBM 486 Think Pads, and I found them quite annoying - too much proprietary nonsense and the Lego-like nature of their construction required constant reassembly. The IBM versions of the OSs that came with these machines reflected IBM's proprietary eccentricities. I don't know if this is a problem with their Pentium machines or not, but you might be more successful if you had the OS that shipped with the machine or an upgrade for the machine, but then maybe not - who knows?

[format c:]

IN fdisk you need to make a primary dos partition and set it as active then you reboot with your win 95 setup disk in the floppy drive and then type format c: then you can install your OS I hope this helps ya