Ok I am sitting here with this thinkpad 240x and from what I can gather, the hard drive has been wiped when I turn it on I get this

Partition corrupt or doesnt exist, save to disk feature disabled run phisk bla bla bla

then operating system not found

So as it stands I have 2 choices, windows xp install from disk)

or windows 98 floppy to begin with then 2 cd's

then thinkbad reconises the floppy drive, but not the usb external cd drive, god knows what type of connection the floppy drive uses a serial like one... I am not sure, anyway that works, the usb external cd drive is the orginal and does work on other computers

So help me where do I go from here

Here is a link to M$ to get the floppy disk utility

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994 you will need to have an external optical drive that hooks up to usb, another computer to download the file and to make the floppy (six) disks.once you have done this, you can boot from the floppys, with the optical drive hooked up. you can also see if the laptop has external usb boot in the bios.

This article might be of interest.

Install Windows XP without floppy or cd drives

Thanks guys all sorted now thinkpad lives!!