hello,
I recently was given an old IBM laptop from my dad. It is an IBM ThinkPad 240 and that is about the extent of my knowledge about it!
When he gave it to me, it had no operating system on it. I figured I was going to install Ubuntu on it to get it up and running and decide what I'm going to do with it.
The first problem I ran into is that there is no disk drive. Luckily I have an old iomega external disk drive that I think I might be able to use, but I'm not sure if I have to install it first (which I can do without an operating system?). This external disk drive operates through the USB port.

If I can use it, there should be a setting in the BIOS that will allow me to "boot from disk" correct? If there is, I cannot find it =(. The only option I see in the "Power On" section of the BIOS is "Removable Devices" and "Hard Drive".
In "Removable Devices" is says "Legacy Floppy Drives"
In "Hard Drive" it says "TOSHIBA MK1016GAP-(PM)" and "Bootable Add-in Cards"

I have no idea what these things are but I definitely do not see a floppy drive on the laptop.
It does have a serial port if that would be helpful.

Basically, I'm asking how do I go about loading an OS on this computer.
Also, I downloaded ubuntu from the website but I'm not sure how to make it into a boot disk.

Thank you very much for your time,
Matt

Creating a bootable Ubuntu disc is simple enough. Download the .iso file, then use an ISO burner to decompress and fill the disc. If you're using a Windows OS, ISO Recorder V2 works very nicely. What kind of external disk does your Iomega drive use?

I was able to find this online concerning my external disk drive:


Iomega® CD-RW 40x12x48x USB 2.0 External Drive

I hope this information is helpful, if not I can look for more.

Thank you for your response, Im going to try to make that boot disk now.

Thanks,
Matt

Your BIOS might be so old that it does not allow booting to a USB device. Possibly you could update the BIOS. There are different versions of Linus that fit on a floppy disk. May after you install such, then find a way to download a different version
This is one such version http://www.linfo.org/mulinux.html

I'm going to move you to our Linux forum

the BIOS may also be modified by IBM to prevent certain modifications.

It can be done via a network install, but it is not gonna be easy.
UNetbootin - Universal Netboot Installer
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/