Feel free to post whether the drivers here work good on your Thinkpad T42 or not.

It's possible these may work on other similar Thinkpad models too. I don't have any other Pentium M Thinkpads to confirm though.

Cool! I have a Thinkpad X32 (dual booting XP and Ubuntu right now) I might have to try this with later. Seems like the hardware is pretty similar from what I remember off the top of my head.

I don't have an X32, so I can't confirm whether any of these drivers would be compatible. The typical spec sheet sounds similar, but none seem to give specific model numbers or anything.

Between T42 and X32: The chipset and LAN are the same, so the motherboard, sound and Ethernet driver should work.

Wifi is the same (in the sense that the same cards were used across both models), but there were different versions (Intel 2100B, Intel 2200BG and some Thinkpad-branded Atheros card). They are all interchangeably anyways.

The video and CardBus differ. X32 has the basic Mobility Radeon, the T42 can have Radeon 7500 or Radeon 9600. The same driver may support all three, but not necessarily so. CardBus - you will need different drivers as the T42 uses a Texas Instruments part, and X32 a Ricoh part.

If anyone using my driver download ends up obtaining other drivers to suit additional T42 configurations, or if the X32 can be accommodated, let me know and I can update the driver download.

If you wish, we can expand this thread to cover other Thinkpads. Following that other thread, I actually decided to try to install Windows ME on my Thinkpad A31p. This machine came with XP, but I have absolutely no use for it, since it is too slow for modern tasks, and I have plenty of other XP machines. However, for a fast Win9x gaming machine it could be good, and I decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have first hand experience with Windows ME.

The installation itself went smoothly, and most drivers are actually officially available from IBM/Lenovo (since A31p officially supports WinME, unlike many Thinkpads). However, there are a couple of major deal breakers.

1. Wireless

This machine has the Atheros-based IBM a/b/g adapter for which the mentioned 1qwc70ww.exe driver should work. That driver does not officially support ME for some reason, only 98, but I assume that ME can load the 98 driver. At first it wouldn't install, until I realized that the .INF for the driver specifics a concrete subsystem ID, and the card I have has different IDs (I guess it was not originally an IBM part). Luckily, we are dealing with pre-NT6 drivers, which require no signature, and so tampering with the INF is possible. I just removed the subsystems (effectively turning it into a 2-part driver vs a 4-part driver), and then it installed.

Still, it does not work. Every boot it displays the error "Your network adapter is not working properly. You may need to set it up again. For more information see the network troubleshooter." The device is banged out with Code 10, which is not very specific as it says that the device is "either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed". Clicking on "Driver File Details" lists the correct driver (ar52119x.sys), but at the same time says "File not installed". At this point I cannot get the wireless to work. This exact adapter worked in XP just before I wiped it out, so I know it is not defective, and I would prefer not to have to hunt for a different adapter, and then "hope for the best". So I am at a a loss as far as how to resolve this

2. Keyboard Customizer

Pre-Lenovo Thinkpads do not have the Windows key, and there is a Keyboard Customizer utility which allows you to assign the right Alt key (or something else) to it. It also has a few other useful functions. However, it is only supported on NT-based systems, and while it does install, it won't run, complaining about a missing export in SHELL32.DLL (StrStrIA). Maybe by chance one of the many unofficial patches for 9x/ME can bring this missing functionality (a quick search did not find anything).

However, in the meanwhile, I found out that Key Remap from the Win95/98/ME/2000 Software Toolkit works great for mapping one of the modifiers to the Windows key, so at least that part is settled. Now only the Wifi problem remains. There is also one "unknown device" in the Device Manager, and I am not sure what it is, but so far I cannot think of anything important that it might be.

I have an T42p and it has Problems with Lan and Wifi.
Lan installed but has a yellow symbol in device manager.
Wifi did not install at all (windows found no driver) when installing.

Sound and Graphics work, but i think its to slow only 4140 points in 3dmark 2000.

Another source for drivers https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad-Driver … t/ddfm/T42.html

Change OS to Windows Me and you'll get a bunch of 9x drivers as well. Courtesy ThinkPad forums.

The first link worked fine for me on a T41 2373 thinkpad, while the second link gave me lots of problems.
Thank you

I found this thread in the search engine and proved to be quite helpful. I was able to successfully install Windows 98SE (Polish) on my T42 2374 and it's stable, so I thought I'll chime in and share my experiences.

My use case was to play some classic singleplayer games once in a while. Note that I don't have a functioning and compatible MiniPCI WLAN card, so all I needed was a system with working multimedia and basic USB capabilities.

It might get a few tries to get it right. I'm sharing my process, which I streamlined as much as I could, maybe it will prove useful to someone.

1. I downloaded all Windows 98 compatible drivers from IBM/Lenovo official site (archive). Except the WDM audio driver that is required for emulated CD Audio. More on that later
2. I downgraded BIOS to 3.21 to solve the problem with USB enumeration known under Windows 98SE (this has been documented in README file for BIOS 3.23) I also disabled Floppy and IRDa in BIOS setup, no reason for those to clutter the OS with unnecessary stuff.
3. I booted up Win98SE's DOS and formatted the target drive (60GB). Note that WinXP's+ format utlity will FAIL to do so.
4. Ran Windows setup and installed it. I skipped the creation of boot disk, also skipped the part about PCMCIA devices because I don't have any. No issues so far, after bootup it will complain about a bunch of missing devices, which can be skipped for now.
5. Extracted the Install Support package tpisos98.exe (README) and applied the INF file that comes with it. It should add an entry to the registry. Reboot.
6. Extracted Chipset driver oss206ww.exe (readme) and installed infinst_autol.exe, reboot. It complains about the missing driver for 82855PM. I think it can be found in C:\WINDOWS\INF, it requires the 855 driver that should be already there. If not, look in extracted package. If not, cancel, extract infinst_autol.exe with 7-zip, reboot and try again. Reboot.
7. Extracted ICH APM fix ideapmos.exe (readme) and applied extracted registry file to resolve the conflict with Ultra ATA Storage Controller in Device Manager. Rebooted, checked, verified as fixed.
8. Ran nusb36e.exe and followed attached instructions. Rebooted, verified. HID devices work OK, just allow to find the device wizard to install HID driver from the Windows disc. Mass storage works OK.
9. Ran Radeon 7500 driver installer Vftp1gme.exe (readme). Rebooted, verified, no problems here.
10. Ran WDM SoundMAX Audio driver D64z32us.exe (readme). Rebooted. Windows will ask you for a file smx.cat, it's available in C:\IBMTOOLS\DRIVERS\D64Z32US\SMAXWDM\SE. Verified, sound OK. MIDI requires one more reboot, works OK.
11. Installed UltraNav driver Unav1i9m.exe (readme) to get that sweet ThinkPad'y middle button scrolling. No issues, just the keyboard is not working until rebooted.
12. Installed SpeedStep 1ysue1us.exe (readme), rebooted. It's a frequency scaling utility, probably optional.
13. Installed DirectX 9 DEC 2006 and 3DMark 2001 SE to verify its gaming potential. Got 4135 3D marks (on XP it was 3900-ish).

Observations:

• Installing "82855PM Processor to I/O Controller - 3340" driver is crucial for loading/running 3D games smoothly. This is based on my observations with 3DMark 2001 SE. Without this driver, games were performing very poor in True Color colorspace, and in High Color they were still occassionally stuttering. Windows wasn't able to find it automatically in my case, but if it asks for it, try pointing to C:\WINDOWS\INF directory. It looks for the 855 driver.
• I noticed that installing the ethernet driver adds additional ~20 seconds to boot time. For me, it's not worth it. Also I don't have a functioning WLAN card to compare it with. I might be wrong but I think enabling networking in general yields similar results. I suggest creating a HDD/system partition image with something like Clonezilla before installing network drivers.
• I also don't recommend installing the Bluetooth driver. It crashed the system during install, made the system hilariously unstable, even after uninstalling it I exprienced crazy glitches and hangups.
• Also, important note regarding the Wireless driver, per README. It requires an additional install of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) core components in order to run. If you failed installing it, try again with WMI installed.
• If you want to install Cardbus PCMCIA drivers... I haven't had much luck in removing generic one after Windows has been installed, but you will definitely get it working if you put the files in WIN98 directory you install Windows from, and they'll be correctly and automatically installed. You can find more information in README under section "Unattended Install (before Windows 98/SE setup)." (archive.org).
• I noticed no problems with missing CD-ROM drivers. I was also surprised to see my USB drives in DOS listed as regular drives. I think that's BIOS that does the job during bootup.
• And one more general advice... If you plan on playing any DOS CD-ROM games, either from physical or emulated drive... make sure you use the first available CD-ROM drive, in alphabetical order. Many DOS games use only first CD-ROM drive they can find, very often for CD audio, sometimes for copy-protection. Reassign the drive letters from device manager if you must.
• Tools like Hiren's BootCD 15.2 (archive) and even most recent Medicat USB 21.01 (for 32-bit tools like Acronis True Image) work well on this machine. Use them!
• IBM's Battery MaxiMiser tray applet causes problems after quitting some DOS games and sometimes it freezes some shell components. You can disable it from Battery MaxiMiser Wizard.

All links in my post are available in archive.org. Good luck!

Hello All, just wanted to say how useful I found these guides for setting up my T41, so big thanks to Notsofossil and Mard for sharing their experiences. My setup is 1.4ghz, 128gb msata (in the IDE caddy) and 1.5gb ram. My install was reletively easy (not sure whether I have been lucky so far or this is down to using the T41) just using the drivers on the Thinkpads archive, however I did use the WDM Soundmax driver Mard linked. I did have to remove one of my ram sticks in order to get Win98 to install, then run Rloew's Patchmem to put it back again (I'm dualbooting with XP so seemed a shame to waste it). I'm not sure if I accidentally nudged a cable while doing this as now the left trackpad button doesn't work. Track pad itself and track point buttons work fine but I would like to get it working.

One odd occurrance was when installing the Chipset drivers (I think) it changed the splash screen to the newer Intel logo vs the original Centrino. I'm tempted to upgrade then downgrade the BIOS back to 3.21 but I'm probably tempting fate there. It is annoying that it doesn't match the Centrino sticker...

Now its time to finish setting up Windows just the way I remember and fill it up with games before putting it on the shelf never to be looked at ever again!

Thought I'd share the steps I took to get it on my ThinkPad T42 2373-M66
Fun fact, I bought this from an ex-IBM employee in Sydney a few years back. He also sold me a few other machines which are long gone but this one remains!

Formatted C: Drive, copied win98 folder over and ran setup from there.
Installed PATCHMEM (as using 2GB of ram, I'm usually against this but I want to keep the ram in here. Anything over 512mb is overkill for Win98)
Installed USB mass storage drivers from CD
Ran infinst_autol.exe for the Intel Chipset
ATi Radeon 7500 drivers installed using the 'have disk' method, selected first in the list. It prompted me that the signature's were off but continued.
Rebooted
Intel drivers all picked up ok including 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller - 3340 driver from the INF folder.
Changed display res to the native 1024x786 32bit, no issues.
Used d64z32us.exe for sound
Used tpet1u98.exe for ethernet - had to manually 'have disk' this one to the PRO1000 folder
Noticed the DVD drive is now no longer appearing in My Computer - rebooted.
Got a BSOD saying Unable to write to disk in Drive C:, pressed any key to continue, then more blue screens! This kind of pissed me off, but after rebooting again it worked. Perhaps it was the USB drive i had left in!
DVD drive now showing up
Ran ossa04ww.exe and updated drivers in device manager for the PCI-4520 cardbus controller - this locked up so I had to force a reboot. I'm going to leave these as the generic drivers for the time being.
Installed the UltraNav driver Unav1i9m.exe -> extracted and ran Setup.exe. Once this was done it caused the system to lockup. I rebooted again but the system locked up on the splash screen 😠
Safe mode, then changed from IBM to Synaptics, still crashes on splash screen. Safe mode again, removed Intel ethernet driver, now it boots. Looks like the ultranav driver was a red herring.
"New hardware found" window came up for the Intel Ethernet, but stopped responding...
Used 8255xdel.exe to remove the drivers
Downgraded BIOS to 3.21
Trying alternative ethernet drivers from https://download.cnet.com/WIN98SE-8-6-11-0-EX … 2_4-103814.html, these worked! Had to manually renew IP with winipcfg
Enabled DMA on hard drive
Reboot again
WiFi installed via 1qwc70ww.exe however the device wasn't detected even If i tried to force the drivers. I'm not bothered about using WiFi anyway so I'll ignore that for now.

There are still four 'Other Devices' in Device Manager, but the system is at a point where I can use it comfortably. Going to run some benchmarks and if it's stable I have myself another machine for LAN parties!

Since this thread feels a little unresolved, here's what I did to set up 98 SE on a T42 using the drivers from Lenovo's EOL site for anyone who finds their way here. Aside from a WiFi card that's probably not 98-compatible (only four of the models they used have 98 drivers on the EOL site), one unidentified device that's probably the TPM, and not yet having looked into SoundBlaster emulation, everything just works pretty well.

NOTE: All floppies mentioned are actually disk images chainloaded from my PXELINUX netboot menu (Access IBM → F12 → PCI LAN). That said, I don't see why they wouldn't work equally well booted from other media.

NOTE: I completely forgot about PATCHMEM until the very end, despite the machine having 768MiB of RAM. Since it worked out fine, I'll just mention that here.

1. Partition the drive

fdisk can get very annoying, and I don't trust modern partitioning tools to know the DON'Ts of 90s bootloaders, so I used a PartitionMagic 8 boot disk to wipe the drive's contents and create a new 80GB FAT32 primary partition, ignoring its polite "This partition crosses the 1024 cylinder boundary and may not be bootable" message.

2. Make the drive bootable and copy on the minimum set of install files

I booted off a Windows 98 SE Boot Disk (Windows98_SE.img from https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html if I remember correctly), inserted my Windows 98 SE CD, and then ran:

1sys a: c:
2mkdir c:\drivers
3mkdir c:\drivers\win98se
4copy e:\win98\*.* c:\drivers\win98se

After that, the next step was to get "Intel PRO 10/100/1000 LAN ethernet adapter software for Windows 98, 98 SE, NT 4.0 - ThinkPad R40, T40, T41, T42, X31, X32, X40" from the ThinkPad T42 page on Lenovo's EOL drivers site onto the machine.

My approach was to run miniserve -p 8002 "/srv/retro/Win9x/drivers/Thinkpad T42" on my main PC, boot the Thinkpad T42 off a Damn Small Linux 4.4.10 ISO, and run the following commands:

1wget http://192.168.0.2:8002/tpet1u98.exe
2sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
3sudo mv tpet1u98.exe /mnt/hda1/drivers/
4sudo umount /mnt/hda1
5sudo reboot

Naturally, any means of getting tpet1u98.exe onto the drive should work equally well. I just like my little PXELINUX recovery menu.

3. Install just enough to load the rest of the drivers from my Samba server

NOTE: I'm not sure what determines success or failure, but it's possible to screw up making C: bootable with these steps so, if it doesn't want to boot off C: at this stage, just boot off the Windows 98 SE boot disk again.

Now, start the Windows install process in its default mode:

1c:
2cd \drivers\win98se
3setup

For the most part, just go with the flow, but I recommend choosing Custom and enabling Internet Tools → Web-Based Enterprise Mgmt. That's what Windows 98's installer called WMI and you may need it. (eg. the drivers for certain WiFi cards need it)

Once the process is finished, and it's booted into Windows 98 SE in glorious 640x480@16 Colors, run tpet1u98.exe and then open up Control Panel → System → Device Manager. In my experience the top of the two driverless "PCI Ethernet Controller" adapters is the wired NIC, and you want to point the driver search's "Specify a location:" at C:\Drivers\Win\Ethernet\Pro1000\Win_98ME

After restarting, the wired Ethernet is up and able to connect to my \\monolith-tng\retro\Win9x\drivers\Thinkpad T42 share for the rest of the drivers I pulled off Lenovo's EOL site.

4. Install the rest of it

Here is the order I installed everything else in, with explicit mention of when I rebooted:

First, I installed vftp1gme.exe, which is "(Video driver (ATI Mobility Radeon/FireGL series) for Windows 98/Me - ThinkPad A31/p, R40, T30, T40, T41, T42, X31". I want a bigger, less ugly screen ASAP. Run to unpack and then run C:\Drivers\W9x\Display\Setup.exe to install. Choose "No, I will restart my computer later."

Second, I installed aftp1g98.exe which is "Audio driver for Windows 98 - ThinkPad A31/p, R40, T30, T40/p, T41, T42, X30, X31", version 4.11.01.0627a. The sooner I can satisfy the urge to hear the welcome window's music and then stop it from popping up every time, the better. Run to unpack and then run C:\Drivers\Win\Audio\Setup.exe to install. Choose "No, I will restart my computer later." IBM also offers version 5.12.01.5410 (1ga241ww.exe) as a WDM-based driver, but I prefer to go with the VXD versions unless they cause issues, to hear the vendor's software MIDI instead of just another use of Microsoft's. (Plus, I've already got an HP t5530 running Windows 98 SE with WDM drivers.)

Third, I installed the chipset support. Depending on whether you have a T42 or a T42/p, that's either chps1o98.exe or oss206ww.exe. I suggest trying the former first if you're unsure, since multiple people have confirmed that it will cleanly check and refuse if you try to run it on the wrong model. As usual, run it, then run the installer it dropped under C:\Drivers ...but this time, choose "Yes, I want to restart my computer now."

That should be the minimum loadout for comfortably installing the remaining drivers.

Note that, after the first reboot when it found all the new hardware, the ThinkPad appeared to hang at "Windows is shutting down." I imagine this is probably down to some part of piling up those drivers on a single reboot, but I couldn't be bothered to start over to check. I gave it a couple of minutes of no disk activity light and then power-cycled the machine and the lack of a scandisk run on boot suggests it hung after cleanly flushing any disk caches. The problem didn't recur.

At this point, if your laptop has the same set of options as mine, the unrecognized devices in the Device Manager should be "PCI Card", "PCI Ethernet Controller", "PCI Universal Serial Bus", and "Unknown Device".

While it's not in that list, the next thing I installed was 1yoi04ww.exe, which is "Monitor File for Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP - ThinkPad General" and is installed under Control Panel → Display Properties → Settings → Advanced → Monitor → Change → Have Disk, instead of using an installer. It unpacks to C:\Drivers\Win\Monitor\Win98 and the one that corresponded to my model of T42 was "IBM ThinkPad 1024x768 LCD panel". I also took the opportunity to up the color depth from 16-bit to 32-bit while I was in there.

I then installed unav1i9m.exe (UltraNav driver for Windows 98/Me - ThinkPad R40, T30, T40, T41, T42. Run C:\Drivers\W98\Unav\Setup.exe after unpacking) so I could immediately (no reboot), go into Control Panel → Mouse → UltraNav → TouchPad → Settings → Tapping and uncheck "Enable Tapping". It's also not one of the four unknown devices.

I also added @ECHO OFF to the top of autoexec.bat at this stage to keep it from interrupting the boot splash.

To get rid of the "PCI Card", install 78ma08ww.exe (ThinkPad integrated 56K modem driver for Windows 98/98SE/NT4.0/2000/XP - ThinkPad G41, R50e, R51/e, R52, T42/p, T43/p, X32, X40, X41, X41 Tablet). Once unpacked, the installer to run is C:\Drivers\Win\Swmdmcnt\Hxfsetup.exe. I just cancelled out of sub-installers like NetWaiting.

As for PCI Universal Serial Bus, it's in addition to the USB controllers covered by the chipset drivers, and I didn't bother to investigate further because nusb36e.exe from the VOGONS Driver Library is needed for some other stuff I wanted (eg. x360c.w98.x86.en.zip) and it took care of it.

I've tried all of the WiFi drivers, so I assume I got a model of "PCI Ethernet Controller" that only has drivers for newer OSes. ...but it is a Mini PCI card according to the Hardware Maintenance Manual.

I suspect the remaining "Unknown Device" to be the TPM, which only has drivers for Windows 2000 and above, given that I have vague memories of discovering that to be the case on another machine which was probably the ThinkPad T410 I run "Windows XP pretending very convincingly to be Windows 98 SE" on.

At this point, aside from sorting out SoundBlaster emulation, that just leaves things like DirectX updates, DAEMON Tools 3.47, 7-Zip 9.20, QRes, and the most important package of all... sc2kthm.zip.

Aside from that one hang while shutting down after the first batch of drivers, I experienced no issues and test games like Timon and Pumbaa's Jungle Games (which blue-screened the WDM audio drivers for my t5530) and Future Cop L.A.P.D. ran flawlessly... with the added benefit that, since it's an ATi mobile GPU instead of an Intel onboard like in my T410 running "XP pretending to be 98SE", I also haven't encountered problems with a test run of Populous: The Beginning.

I'm not sure when I'll next have time, so I'm not sure when I'll get to the SoundBlaster emulation.

EDIT: To clarify, by "not yet having looked into SoundBlaster Emulation", I mean that I did toggle Control Panel → System → Device Manager → Sound, video, and game controllers → SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio → Settings → Enable Sound Blaster Emulation and then reboot as mentioned in this thread, which did set BLASTER, but Skunny Kart Shareware still says it can't initialize the audio.

Also, hot-plugging wired Ethernet doesn't seem to work, but it's been so long since I ran it on a laptop that I can't remember if that's just a Windows 98-ism that would normally be resolved by one of the packages I didn't install. A batch file containing the ipconfig /release_all, ipconfig /renew_all dance that I can double-click for convenience does the job just fine without extra resident programs.