i cant boot any bootdisk.
i can only install ms dos on the hdd using vmware or another laptop and then i can boot ms dos on thinkpad.
right now i installed ms dos 6.0 with cd-rom driver. now im running setup from the cd.
this laptop do not support booting from cd. only floppy. but i dont have a floppy drive 🙁

Edit:
so i did this
took the hdd out and put it in a compaq and installed msdos with cd-rom driver
i installed back the hdd on thinkpad and booted fine ms-dos and started setup from cd-rom.
installed fine but on first reboot it gets stuck on flashing line - and thats it.
funny thing is .. if i take the hdd from compaq and put it in thinkpad.. it boots 98 from compaq fine !!!
hdd has good health and no bad sectors.

Put the thinkpad HDD in Compaq and install win98 (se?). Then move the HDD back to Thinkpad.

Edit: while in Compaq, check the HDD surface for bad sectors.

Suggest moving this thread to General Hardware, as it has more visitors, so you could get more input there.

Zerthimon wrote on 2023-10-04, 20:46:

Put the thinkpad HDD in Compaq and install win98 (se?). Then move the HDD back to Thinkpad.

Edit: while in Compaq, check the HDD surface for bad sectors.

hdd is clean, ran a crystaldiskinfo.
i have no other way for now 🙁

i took hdd out.. put it in vmware and booted ms-dos and created a 1 gb partition and installed ms dos 6.22
thinkpad boots fine once i put hdd back. inserted 98 cd and installed. worked fine until first restart and back again on flashing line " - ".
if i take hdd out again and put it in vmware it starts booting 98 "preparing to run first time..."
what is going on ? i dont understand what and how to fix this !

Instead of installing dos and loading a cdrom driver on the thinkpad. Try installing dos and no cdrom driver and just load himem.sys in the config sys. Copy all the 98 files to the Hard disk and install from the hard disk instead of from a cd.

Warlord wrote on 2023-10-06, 16:21:

Instead of installing dos and loading a cdrom driver on the thinkpad. Try installing dos and no cdrom driver and just load himem.sys in the config sys. Copy all the 98 files to the Hard disk and install from the hard disk instead of from a cd.

tried that. got the same result. himem.sys loads by default.
🙁

How much ram does you Thinkpad have?
What size of the on-board ram and what size of the mem modules, if any, are there?

49152KB installed and usable 48798KB
as the bios show up
dont know were ram sticks are located.

That must be the on-board ram then. The thing is that it would be nice to find a way to test the memory, somehow. The best way would be to run memtest86+, but you'd need a floppy for that ( . Would you be able to get a floppy drive?

Zerthimon wrote on 2023-10-09, 21:02:

That must be the on-board ram then. The thing is that it would be nice to find a way to test the memory, somehow. The best way would be to run memtest86+, but you'd need a floppy for that ( . Would you be able to get a floppy drive?

sadly not at this momment.. i cant afford one bc of shipping price since i live in romania. shipping costs about 30-50$ and a floppy drive is like 9-10$.
my only option is to install ms dos with cd rom driver on hdd then put it back in thinkpad. then try to run memtest from cd manualy..

You cannot run Memtest86+ from dos, It must be booted.

</Quote>
Memtest86+ can be run from a USB Flash Drive (FAT32 formatted), CDROM drive (by burning the ISO to a blank disk) or Network boot (PXE). If you need a floppy image, use the "make iso" command to generate a 'floppy.img' file
<Quote/>
https://www.memtest.org/

Can this ThinkPad boot from CDROM ?

No. Only floppy that I don’t have 🙁