ibm thinkpad 770 cdrom prob

I have an IBM 770 thinkpad that was given to me with a problimatic CD-rom. The hard drive was trashed and would not boot. I tried booting with a recovery floppy and it started thae machine but the contents of the HD were truly mucked up.

So I reformated the drive and downloaded the necessary files from IBM so I could restore windows. Well to make a long story short, I cannot access the CD at all. Everytime I try to use the IBM boot disk I created, I get a "cannot find CD-rom" error. It appears they expect you to have the CD in the multibay at the same time you are booting from the floppy (in the multibay). I tred copying all the relevant files to the HD and booting with the CD in the bay and the machine just hangs.

I want to use the machine to do some network troubleshooting and just need windows and a few network utilities so I can work on troublesome links at work. You guessed right if you think my bosses (I work for the USPS as a tech)are to cheap to buy any machines for thispurpose.

I will probably just use laplink to transfer the windows installation folder over to the hard drive and install it from there. This should work but I still probably will have to live without a cd to install programs from.

If anyone has any clues i would appreciate any help offered.

thanks,

Bob