I have a think pad 770. I made the mistake of thinking that it worked like a desk top unit. Anyway, I set the hd partition to support large and formatted the disk. The problem I have now is , when I try to load the windows 98 cd the screen says invalid system disk. I took the cd to my desk top and explored it , it does not seem to be an autostat cd. What can I add to the cd to make the thinkpad see it as an system disk so it will start. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I may have more than one problem

Does this laptop has a floppydrive? In that case you should create an emergency boot diskette on another W98 system (Control panel->Software->Bootdiskette), or download one <http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm>.

Boot from that floppy, and on the command prompt type

D: <enter>
cd \Win98 <enter>
setup <enter>

I don't think Win98 (itself), works very will with partitions. I'm a bit worried with partition when i install Linux.

How would an OS "not work well with partitions" ?
Indianchief, if there's no floppy in your Thinkpad, you could try to make a bootable cd with the above floppy as "boot image" and the content of your Win98 disk.