Thinkpad T61p Notes
April 12th, 2008 at 11:52 pm (Rubbish Heap)
The laptop was ordered configured with Home Vista with the intention, upon receipt, of installing XP Pro. It’s not as simple as reformatting the drive and installing the older more benign OS. The laptop arrives with the system restore data installed on a hidden hdd partition. This seems to have become acceptable practice among the major vendors of Wintel machines.
In any event, the first order of business was to backup the factory installed system. Recovery discs were created along with a Rescue and Recovery Startup disc using the ThinkVantage utility intended for this task. The utility was a bit temperamental, but came through, at the end of the day.
Before installing XP Pro, two things had to be done after the recovery discs were made (for posterity, I suppose). The first was to set the drive to ‘compatibility’ in the system BIOS. The second part was to remove the hdd partitions.
Any attempt to install XP straightaway results in a failure to install owing to an inability of the installer to recognize the hdd. It will report there are no candidate drives. To work around this stumbling block it was necessary to enter BIOS (F1 during boot sequence) and select Config > Drive and change the setting to Compatibility. Having done this, it was finally possible to proceed with the install.
The next step was to remove all partitions, including the hidden partition containing the recovery data and ThinkVantage content. As a result of doing this, a considerable amount of drive capacity was recovered. Vista’s charm was an easy trade-off, at the end of the day. XP’s smaller footprint was pure gravy.
Finally, I installed Thinkpad drivers for this model downloaded from the Lenovo support site. The installation of these drivers followed a particularly thorough and fairly easy to follow discussion of a clean install procedure, more or less. One of the steps involved putting the BIOS change made above back to the original setting. It was quite tedious, but at the end of the day (literally), everything was brought to life, that is to say, re-animated.