*shrugs* I wouldn't expect Win7 to come up on different hardware and run... The hash tag off the hardware will be too far off... But it does prove the thing can boot. You could scrub your 80 off, put a 2g fat part on it and load DOS... If it will boot that, then you know your boot sector on the 80 is fine, and you can run DOS hardware diag software on it to determine what you have to work with.
As to the WINXP needed to complete the BIOS thing:
You CAN prepare a WinXP on another box... If you have a partition manager and a test bench machine:
on the 80g, Make a 10g. primary fat32 to shove the OS back (to allow room for the utility PART, which will have to be the first PART generally...
fill the rest of the drive (whatever... enough to get XP on is is all you need) with a primary NTFS PART, then Del the FAT PART.
Load it up new with XP, putting it in the NTFS PART (don't mind un-found drivers)... Then edit the reg to del the HKLM/Enum key...
Then put that hdd in the real box, boot direct to SAFE, let it find...Once it is running, boot normal, and do the deed with the BIOS thing
It will crap the XP Installation (MBR will now point to Utility part, NT suddenly on the 2nd Part instead of the 1st... Bootloader will die a cruel death)... but your utility part will be installed.... DEL the NT PART, and you are at square-one.
LOL! Dunno if you want to go to all that trouble just to find out it is a frisbee, but that oughta work.
Note that the readme for the BIOS upgrade Dead Corpse found does not state that it even has a utility partition - sounds more like an on-board flash = but I would do the above anyway, just in case (allows for a utility part if it needs it). One way or another, it seems to need the latest flash to 'fix boot problems' as the readme admits. Might look around for a DOS version of the flash utility, because it would be a whole lot easier to do with that : )
Thanks for the recipe. BTW, can I do all this using a USB bridge to the HDD? I don’t want to rip open my good LT to put drives in and out. Don’t have a box or other LT that I could do that to.
I have tried using Ultimate Boot disk but it really doesn’t recognize drives attached via USB as HDD’s. I can’t get the Command structure on it. I’ve tried formatting but it won’t make it a system disk and the /s tag doesn’t work from command prompt.