Upgrading IBM TX 20 to XP

[jlockley]

I have an old, magnificent IBM TX20 Thinkpad I want to upgrade to XP. The X20 comes with a recovery panes (which I have already used to wipe the disk) with Win98. I had upgraded to 2K by copying the files to C and just letting it rip, but I wonder if it is possible to upgrade the recovery system to XP (or advisable).

Note: The X20 is less than 3 lb and comes without a CD drive. mine has one broken USB ports, but the rest is fine if slow. the OS cannot be upgraded from the USB ports, and there is no apparent way to reach the bios. (Going to look elsewhere on this) Only 10GB hard drive. I want it simple for travel. (Even though the battery is not as good as later models).

 

[goombawaho]

That model does not come up for me in a google search. Are you sure you have the right model number??? If it's very old, there may not be XP drivers for your devices.

Please repost the model number.

 

[xkjdhdg]

It is a 600 MHZ machine and could be upgrade to XP. Youo would need to repartition your hard drive. Are you sure it is just a ten some came with a twenty GB hard drive.

 

[jlockley]

Sure all the way around. The X20 (9662) was a fairly high end model at the time..which gives its age. It's light. I since have a faster, larger etc model with plenty more room.

The question here is if it is possible to replace the built in windows 98 rescue system (which takes a lot of room) with XP.

A few more questions would be:

Is there a way to access the IBM bios? The usual bios access is not available.

All software will be loaded in laptop mode, ie bare necessities. It will have four programs and an app or two (or five if adobe counts): Word, Excel, Word perfect, Eudora and Clipmate. Nada mas. I am sure there is a barebones option for xp, correct? Forgot: Winzip. Plus AVG. That should leave about 4 GB free.

One of the reasons for reformatting is that I upgraded to w2k after loading some software, and some did not register with add/remove programs, so I could not clean out what was unnecessary. The laptop was running relatively satisfactorily with W2k, actually.

 

[xkjdhdg]

You can still partition your drive and put the recovery partition in with C partition.

 

[jlockley]

I'd like to partition the current drive, but the issue with this model is that the drive would need to be removed to do this, and the enabling software from IBM would be lost. I saw a while ago that there actually is a fairly complex process to replace the IBM recovery windows 98 with a later version, but google as I might, I can't find it.

The other issue with this and 98 is that there is nearly no way in. I was going to transfer the software to be replaced with a thumb drive, but as it turns out, there are no drivers on 98, so I need to figure out how to first get the drivers for the thumb drive over. I am thinking modem, dial up and download from my site, but maybe a very small (ergo also cheap) drive might not need a driver.

 

[karlisi]

Typically for IBM computers the F1 key is for BIOS setup.
From 'User's Reference - ThinkPad X20, X21'

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-4NWGYA

'Turn on the computer; then, while the ¡¡Press F1 for IBM BIOS
Setup Utility¡¡ message is displayed at the lower-left area of the screen, press F1.'
If you have password protected the BIOS and lost password, you have out of luck. There is no way to recover it.

All USB thumbdrives need drivers for Win98, sorry.



===
Karlis
ECDL; MCSA

 

[jlockley]

S'awroght. I figured it out before, and I can figure it out again.

 

[jwynn]

read up on ACPI i think you find what your looking for

 

[jlockley]

ACPI?