some ps/2 machines have a hidden partition with copies of the reference and diagnostic diskettes images in a hidden system partition on the fixed disk drive. You can access it by pressing CTRL ALT INSERT at a warm reboot when the cursor is at the upper right side of the screen.

Is this page any help to you ?
http://www.walshcomptech.com/selectpccbbs/

Davros wrote:

some ps/2 machines have a hidden partition with copies of the reference and diagnostic diskettes images in a hidden system partition on the fixed disk drive. You can access it by pressing CTRL ALT INSERT at a warm reboot when the cursor is at the upper right side of the screen.

Is this page any help to you ?
http://www.walshcomptech.com/selectpccbbs/

Sorry, but but your link doesn't help to me because diagnostic diskette is not the same as boot disk to recovery CD-ROM (it's 1992, so no boot partition on CD-ROM, and not every manufacturer included on CDs backup image of boot floppy).
Here are photos of disks that were included with PS/2 Ultimedia M57 (while CDs on Archive.org has version 1.1 and I suppose they were bundles with later Ultimedia models incl. M77), and here is @pleonard account on Flickr with some screens of recovery program from boot floppy I'm asking.

did pleonard not answer you or couldnt he help
maybe psot on his twitter page
https://twitter.com/pleonard

Davros wrote:

did pleonard not answer you or couldnt he help
maybe psot on his twitter page
https://twitter.com/pleonard

He simply didn't answer me. As for Twitter, he wouldn't post there anyway.

ArtiomWin wrote on 2019-12-07, 17:37:

[...]

ArtiomWin,

Did you ever acquire the diskette image that you were seeking?

I recently came into possession of an IBM Ultimedia System CD + Installation Diskette for an M57. It is yet a third version (stamped 1.00.1 on both the diskette and the CD) that was manufactured in between the 1.1 version on archive.org, and the 1.0 version pictured on the supervinx site.

From what I can tell, the differences between 1.0, 1.00.1, and 1.1 are as follows:

• 1.0 contains OS/2 2.0 LA (late 1991 release), and Windows 3.0 + Multimedia Extensions
• 1.00.1 contains OS/2 2.0 GA (finalized early 1992 release), and Windows 3.0 + Multimedia Extensions
• 1.1 contains OS/2 2.00.1 (late 1992 release with fixes & MMPM/2 1.0), and Windows 3.1

I have no idea if the installation diskette is generic enough that it is able to bootstrap the install from any version of the System CD, or if each System CD can only be installed by the matching version of the diskette. So I don't know if my 1.00.1 install diskette can be used to install from the 1.1 CD image from archive.org; thus if you haven't tracked down a copy of 1.1, you may have to limit yourself to installing the 1.00.1 system bundle instead.

Here's the difficulty I have (and may in fact be the same difficulty 'lofuses' faced & thus why the 1.1 diskette was not included in the upload to Internet Archive): the diskette in question is a 3.5" ED-density diskette: 2.88MB. I have no drive that can read this diskette (I don't actually own a PS/2 machine), so I can't image it.

Happy to provide you with an image once I find a way to make one, and open to any suggestions short of spending hundreds of $$ on such a drive on eBay. 😉

-- Nathan

nathana wrote on 2021-02-17, 08:04:

Did you ever acquire the diskette image that you were seeking?

Sadly, no.

nathana wrote on 2021-02-17, 08:04:

Happy to provide you with an image once I find a way to make one, and open to any suggestions short of spending hundreds of $$ on such a drive on eBay. 😉

Thank you, I'm looking for it.
P.S. If you have different revision, can you provide full set (i.e., both CDs and floppies)?

ArtiomWin wrote on 2021-02-21, 08:03:

P.S. If you have different revision, can you provide full set (i.e., both CDs and floppies)?

Yes, would be happy to.

Sorry for the delayed reply...I expected to be notified via e-mail to replies and PMs, but perhaps a spam filter ate them.

Also, given the "newness" of my account, apparently I'm not allowed to send nor reply to PMs...ugh.

Anyway, took a look at the eBay listing you linked to. I own no PS/2 machines, so those drives do me no good, with their non-standard pinout and integrated power delivery over the ribbon cable. I am thus in the market for a 2.88 ED drive with standard floppy controller interface pinout & 4-pin AMP power connector. These seem to be rare beasts and typically seem to command some $.

Ideally a USB drive capable of reading ED disks would be best, but these don't seem to exist at all.

One other possible option I'm looking into is a way to shoehorn a ED drive into certain models of ThinkPad...I own an old 770, but 2.88 FDDs were never made for this model; however, it sounds like perhaps the drive mechanism from a 2.88 drive made for the 755/760/765 might be able to be put into the shell of a 770 1.44 drive. Still looking into this.

-- Nathan

nathana wrote on 2021-03-10, 14:43:

One other possible option I'm looking into is a way to shoehorn a ED drive into certain models of ThinkPad...I own an old 770, but 2.88 FDDs were never made for this model; however, it sounds like perhaps the drive mechanism from a 2.88 drive made for the 755/760/765 might be able to be put into the shell of a 770 1.44 drive. Still looking into this.

-- Nathan

Good luck to find. Part number for UltraBay 2.88 floppy drive is 66G0108.

nathana wrote on 2021-03-10, 14:43:

Yes, would be happy to. […]
Show full quote

ArtiomWin wrote on 2021-02-21, 08:03:

P.S. If you have different revision, can you provide full set (i.e., both CDs and floppies)?

Yes, would be happy to.

Sorry for the delayed reply...I expected to be notified via e-mail to replies and PMs, but perhaps a spam filter ate them.

Also, given the "newness" of my account, apparently I'm not allowed to send nor reply to PMs...ugh.

Anyway, took a look at the eBay listing you linked to. I own no PS/2 machines, so those drives do me no good, with their non-standard pinout and integrated power delivery over the ribbon cable. I am thus in the market for a 2.88 ED drive with standard floppy controller interface pinout & 4-pin AMP power connector. These seem to be rare beasts and typically seem to command some $.

Ideally a USB drive capable of reading ED disks would be best, but these don't seem to exist at all.

One other possible option I'm looking into is a way to shoehorn a ED drive into certain models of ThinkPad...I own an old 770, but 2.88 FDDs were never made for this model; however, it sounds like perhaps the drive mechanism from a 2.88 drive made for the 755/760/765 might be able to be put into the shell of a 770 1.44 drive. Still looking into this.

-- Nathan

Hello again. Have you found floppy drive?

ArtiomWin wrote on 2021-04-09, 20:19:

Hello again. Have you found floppy drive?

I took delivery of 2 drives on Thursday that I got for a very good price. They were listed as "refurbished".

Last night, I tried to use them. Both of them appear to not work. They both are defective in the same way: they fail to read any diskette, even known-good 1.44 ones. ("General failure" from DOS, complaints about not being able to read track 0 when attempting a format on a spare diskette)

It does seem suspect that 2 drives would fail to work in the exact same way, so I am going to try them on a different computer. I am also going to clean the heads on both of them before attempting to use them again.

Please be patient. Work is busy, life is busy, I have been ill, and I'm trying to do you a solid, all on my dime. 🙂 Hopefully I'll have some good news soon.

nathana wrote on 2021-04-10, 20:07:

I took delivery of 2 drives on Thursday that I got for a very good price. They were listed as "refurbished". […]
Show full quote

ArtiomWin wrote on 2021-04-09, 20:19:

Hello again. Have you found floppy drive?

I took delivery of 2 drives on Thursday that I got for a very good price. They were listed as "refurbished".

Last night, I tried to use them. Both of them appear to not work. They both are defective in the same way: they fail to read any diskette, even known-good 1.44 ones. ("General failure" from DOS, complaints about not being able to read track 0 when attempting a format on a spare diskette)

It does seem suspect that 2 drives would fail to work in the exact same way, so I am going to try them on a different computer. I am also going to clean the heads on both of them before attempting to use them again.

Please be patient. Work is busy, life is busy, I have been ill, and I'm trying to do you a solid, all on my dime. 🙂 Hopefully I'll have some good news soon.

Get well soon. I know, I'm looking for it for a long time, maybe that's why I'm a bit impatient here. I hope you'll find proper drive, but, just in case you can check drives with other systems.

Tonight, I cleaned the heads on both drives. I then tried both drives on 3 different systems that have 2.88 ED support. The drives worked in none of them.

Again, they both behaved identically in all 3 systems: BIOS recognizes the drive, drive seeks just fine during POST, but the drive is unable to read any disks. Not even 1.44 MB disks.

If I plug a 1.44 drive into the same computers using the exact same cables, that drive can read the same disks just fine.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that these drives are probably defective, but again, it's really weird that they both have the exact same symptoms. I'll maybe post about these drives to a new thread on VOGONS and maybe a couple of other boards to see if anybody might have any ideas about how to get them working.

nathana wrote on 2021-04-10, 20:07:

ArtiomWin wrote on 2021-04-09, 20:19:

Hello again. Have you found floppy drive?

Hopefully I'll have some good news soon.

It was a HUGE pain in the butt that took a lot of time and required overcoming multiple obstacles (including -- it turns out -- that the Ultimedia boot floppy disk I have is starting to lose data integrity! so I got this done just in time), but I'm happy to report that I finally managed to make a working image of this 2.88 ED boot floppy.

I sent you download links both to the floppy image and to the CD-ROM ISO image via forum.thinkpads.com, because I still don't have permission to send PMs on VOGONS yet, and right now these files are being hosted on a low-bandwidth server, so I'd like to avoid publicly posting the URLs for now. I am happy to send copies to anybody else who wants them, though...just send me a PM, and hopefully I'm not too many posts away from being able to reply (but maybe include an e-mail address to reach you at Just In Case)...

Also feel free to share with others and/or put up on archive.org or wherever. Someday I'll get around to setting up an account on there myself, I'm sure; heh.

Nice work nathana! Good thing it all paid off in the end, you must have spent perhaps too many hours getting that drive to work! I can upload the files to vogonsdrivers.com if you'd like (and give you credit ofc). I'll send you a PM with an email address you can respond to.

vetz wrote on 2021-04-20, 23:01:

Nice work nathana! Good thing it all paid off in the end, you must have spent perhaps too many hours getting that drive to work!

It also didn't help at all that my ThinkPad's original hard drive is dead, and the external floppy port appears to no longer be functional, which meant I couldn't have a CD or DVD drive in the system at the same time that I had a floppy drive attached, which in turn meant I was effectively limited to whatever I could do with DOS booting from a HD floppy (no USB boot support on the 770), and oh by the way are y'all aware how FEW DOS-based floppy imagers out there actually support 2.88 media? And that at least one of them that does is broken beyond belief?

I swear: anything that could go wrong with this project, did go wrong.

For the record, the IBM P/N printed on the jewel case insert/leaflet is 42G0494, the P/N printed on the actual disc itself ("The Ultimedia System CD", "Version 1.00.1") is 42G0652, and the P/N printed on the ED diskette ("Ultimedia Installation Diskette", also "Version 1.00.1") is 42G0655.