Hello -
My roommate's IBM Thinkpad 600E has come to a grinding halt - come to find out that he's been surfing all over the place without any virus or spyware protection ever since we got DSL. We didn't realize how innocent he was about computers, and he's getting a painful education now. It's so full of god know what that it will no longer completely boot up, not even in safe mode. I don't even want to try and clean it up, even if it did manage to boot up eventually. We figured that the best thing to do would be to just wipe the whole thing out, reformat it, and reinstalll XP (and a virus scanner).
The problem is that it won't boot to anything but the hard drive, and I can't get to the BIOS to change the boot sequence. I've looked around the internet, checked IBM"S website and the folks that now support their laptops, and I've tried pressing every key and combination of keys while starting up that I've been told to press, and all the other ones I can think of, as well. Nothing works. Either it ignores me completely and continues to try and boot to the hard drive, or else occasionally I get a little icon that looks like it might be a padlock, but no other message telling me to enter a password or anything. Is that what it means, or does it just mean that I've been pressing too many buttons and it's locking me out? I couuldn't find any info about this icon, or much else that was useful, for that matter. And the guy who set this up for my roommate in the first place is not around any more, so there's no help there.
The only thing I can get it to do at this point is to boot to Safe Mode with Command Prompt, and that's not much use. It can't even get throught chkdsk without having an error shut it down. Is there anything else I can try to get it to boot to the CD and/or reinstall XP? I would tell him to just forget it and go get another one, but he can't afford to do that, so I want to make sure that I've tried everything I can. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help!
My roommate's IBM Thinkpad 600E has come to a grinding halt - come to find out that he's been surfing all over the place without any virus or spyware protection ever since we got DSL. We didn't realize how innocent he was about computers, and he's getting a painful education now. It's so full of god know what that it will no longer completely boot up, not even in safe mode. I don't even want to try and clean it up, even if it did manage to boot up eventually. We figured that the best thing to do would be to just wipe the whole thing out, reformat it, and reinstalll XP (and a virus scanner).
The problem is that it won't boot to anything but the hard drive, and I can't get to the BIOS to change the boot sequence. I've looked around the internet, checked IBM"S website and the folks that now support their laptops, and I've tried pressing every key and combination of keys while starting up that I've been told to press, and all the other ones I can think of, as well. Nothing works. Either it ignores me completely and continues to try and boot to the hard drive, or else occasionally I get a little icon that looks like it might be a padlock, but no other message telling me to enter a password or anything. Is that what it means, or does it just mean that I've been pressing too many buttons and it's locking me out? I couuldn't find any info about this icon, or much else that was useful, for that matter. And the guy who set this up for my roommate in the first place is not around any more, so there's no help there.
The only thing I can get it to do at this point is to boot to Safe Mode with Command Prompt, and that's not much use. It can't even get throught chkdsk without having an error shut it down. Is there anything else I can try to get it to boot to the CD and/or reinstall XP? I would tell him to just forget it and go get another one, but he can't afford to do that, so I want to make sure that I've tried everything I can. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help!
