ThinkPad Drivers Snapshot: just in case Lenovo deletes them

[thomase13]

PSREF is on Lenovo's new support site: http://www.lenovo.com/psref/psrefs_withdrawn.shtml so that's probably going to be around for some time.

That is good to hear!

As for other things, download them while you still can from these two sites http://download.lenovo.com/express and http://support1.lenovo.com

I have grabbed a few things, but I have no way to automate anything.

First: All the HMM's have already been secured , and are now being hosted by this wonderful forum! You will find a link at the top of this page

All of the ThinkPad HMMs and most recent drivers have been secured (which I do very much appreciate!), but nothing for other IBM PCs or peripherals. As I said earlier, I understand those are beyond the scope of this forum, but I'm just surprised at the lack of interest! I guess ThinkPads must be nearer and dearer to most people's hearts than regular old IBM PCs. I personally think that most IBM products are generally special because of their superior design. I have gotten the most basic stuff that pertains to my own machines, such as HMMs and P/S Reference Books. It's just too bad that the rest of that stuff will be lost forever!

To repeat myself (from the above post):

The various instructional ThinkPad videos, which I have found on this link, would also be very, very useful to have available (after no longer being available from Lenovo), but these video's will obviously be taking up a bit more diskspace, compared to HTML-files...

Then, how to download these video'es? Go play with "wget32" - see e.g. this post for a suggestion (provided by twistero at the end of the post).

With much difficulty, I did finally get Wget32 working on my system, and able to download SOMETHING, namely the link with the videos you provided, but there are not actually any videos in any of the downloaded directories. I don't know how I could get them.
I now have a few directories but I don't know how to get to the original page that I just archived! There is no simple "index.htm" or anything in any of the main or sub-directories.
[A word to n00bs like myself: To get Wget (which is a command-line utility) to work on Windows, you first have to add "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin" (or wherever you installed it) as a PATH environmental variable, and if the URL is weird, then it must be put in quotation marks! Documentation of GNU programs always seems to expect an awful lot of the user!]

Twistero: I also just saw your python script, and had a look (thanks for the tip about renaming as .txt and viewing it in a browser for line breaks!)
I want to download all of the NetVista stuff from http://download.lenovo.com/express/ddfm.html, but I know nothing about python, and I read through your script, but I didn't see anything obvious I could modify to make it download that. By the time anyone reads this, the sites will likely be gone, but if it's not, then please do reply, because it's going to be very helpful.
In the meantime, I've given up on Wget and fancy scripts, and am just manually downloading what I think is most critical until the site is taken down.
I'm also trying good ol' HTTrack, but not having a lot of success, though more success than with Wget!

[twistero]

Twistero: I also just saw your python script, and had a look (thanks for the tip about renaming as .txt and viewing it in a browser for line breaks!)
I want to download all of the NetVista stuff from http://download.lenovo.com/express/ddfm.html, but I know nothing about python, and I read through your script, but I didn't see anything obvious I could modify to make it download that. By the time anyone reads this, the sites will likely be gone, but if it's not, then please do reply, because it's going to be very helpful.
In the meantime, I've given up on Wget and fancy scripts, and am just manually downloading what I think is most critical until the site is taken down.
I'm also trying good ol' HTTrack, but not having a lot of success, though more success than with Wget!

For downloading drivers you don't need python.

The idea of archiving a page, whether using wget or HTTrack, is to follow every link on the page (and possibly every link on every linked page, every link on pages linked from every linked page, etc...). Problem arises on pages like http://download.lenovo.com/express/ddfm.html because they do not link directly, instead they use javascript and dynamic loading of content, so you have to get creative to get the actual webpages that host direct links.

If you use Firefox, then the "This frame" submenu in the right click menu can be very useful.

For your immediate need, the NetVista page is here:
http://download.lenovo.com/lenovo/conte ... a8181.html

Give that address to HTTrack and start crackin'. Or you can use wget:

Code: Select all

wget http://download.lenovo.com/lenovo/content/ddfm/Netvista8181.html -r -l 1 -k -p -N -w 0.2

When working recursively like this wget will put everything in their original folders. So for example, if you run the command from C:\downloads, the webpage itself will be put in C:\downloads\download.lenovo.com\lenovo\content\ddfm\Netvista8181.html


EDIT: As for movies, looks like they are embedded Flash players, and those are in general very difficult to deal with. I never checked, but am pretty confident that wget will not handle embedded objects like Flash.

[thomase13]

Thanks for your reply!

I am trying your suggestion with Wget right now.
I was trying to get just the Windows XP drivers because it would be faster to download and that's likely all I'd personally use, but it seems more complicated.
What a wonderful time for me to be running out of hard drive space! My internal hard disk drive was down to 250 MB or so before I moved a few files!

Fingers crossed!

[Ibthink]

Lenovo now has decided to create a new website, named "End Of Life Product Resources", where all drivers, BIOS updates and manuals (user-guide and Hardware Maintaince Manuals) will be provided on an as-is basis with no future updates for all products older than T30: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Feedback-on ... 6093#M2341

This new site can be found here: http://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html

As far as I understand, in the future, newer models will slowly be transfered to this site, depending on how old they are (T4x are next).

[thomase13]

So I am happy to say that the wget string was successful! The HTML page looks just like the ones hosted on this site!

Just ignore the Snarf part.

I really appreciate the direct html link as well as all of the right switches, as even if I did read through the entire Wget manual, I doubt I would even understand it.

Next I was going to ask about the movies, but I'm glad you beat me to it!
They are disguised as QuickTime players (and successfully fooled me for a minute), and I'm not sure that would necessarily be easier even if they were, but yes, as you say, they are Flash, and I'm glad to hear that getting them would be nearly impossible, just so that I know it's not just my own ignorance being the obstacle!

Thanks again!


EDIT:

I just saw your post, and I am quite shocked. I just spent the greater part of the past two days scrambling to download things from Lenovo servers before it was deleted, and now they make an EOL site which features exactly what I was just able to successfully download, but doesn't include the stuff I couldn't get. I feel like Lenovo is personally trying to make my life miserable.

Also, I wonder how I can properly download a page like this: http://support1.lenovo.com/en_CA/produc ... MIGR-39142
It's more difficult than it should be to get the image to work for some reason.

[RealBlackStuff]

Also, I wonder how I can properly download a page like this: http://support1.lenovo.com/en_CA/produc ... MIGR-39142

How about going there in your browser, then click on (top left) File and select Save Page As?

[thomase13]

You would think that'd work, but for some reason the
The main image was not showing up before, but it works now when the Web page and resources are downloaded! The internal links in the mapped image are still to Lenovo's server of course, but that's not a big issue!
That's kind of embarrassing, but thank you!

[RealBlackStuff]

Lenovo now has decided to create a new website, named "End Of Life Product Resources", where all drivers, BIOS updates and manuals (user-guide and Hardware Maintaince Manuals) will be provided on an as-is basis with no future updates for all products older than T30: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Feedback-on ... 6093#M2341

This new site can be found here: http://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html

As far as I understand, in the future, newer models will slowly be transfered to this site, depending on how old they are (T4x are next).

Just to pick a few:
T-Series laptops only consist of T2x and T30.
R-Series = R3x and R4x
X-Series = X2x, X3x, and only X41.

EDIT: apologies for earlier text. My eyes must have been in the back of my head...
Earlier machines are stored under 100, 200, 300 etc., must have overlooked those...

[Ibthink]

[Mod-edit: some not-so-nice text removed]
Just to pick a few:
T-Series laptops only consist of T2x and T30.
R-Series = R3x and R4x
X-Series = X2x, X3x, and only X41.

All T models up from T40 (T40-T41-T42-T43-T60-T61 etc.), all X models starting from X40 (with the exception of the X41) and all R Series models newer than R4x can be found here: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/products?c=1

[RealBlackStuff]

And where are the files for machines that came before A, T, R, G, X?
Thank heaven Twistero started the Great Rescue.

[Ibthink]

And where are the files for machines that came before A, T, R, G, X?

They are all on the new End of Life site (http://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html).

[that1nerd]

They are all on the new End of Life site (http://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html).

Neat! The EOL site hosts all the earlier "numbered" models as well.

Looks like I'll be rebuilding my 760XL after all...

[twistero]

Lenovo certainly exceeded my expectations just for making that EOL site. If they are indeed still hosting all the downloads between their new and EOL site, then all the better.

I must say though, the paginated downloads on the new support site looks awful to work with. Filtering becomes absolutely necessary.

[RealBlackStuff]

Apologies about my earlier harsh words! (which I have modified away).
I wasn't looking closely enough to discover the rest.

[JaneL]

That is such a relief that Lenovo listened to their users and kept the files. And kudos to everyone who scrambled to the rescue when it looked like we were going to lose them!

[thomase13]

So it looks like everything is still there for the time being!
Everything I was able to back up is migrated to the new site, and everything I wasn't able to wasn't migrated!

The new site is still missing a heck of a lot of material — just look at the User Guide section, and there is even less selection for desktops! So RBS's harsh words weren't completely unwarranted!

Funnily enough, http://download.lenovo.com/express/ is still up; I guess they decided removing their scary "This page will be gone on Hallowe'en" message would be easier than taking down the website itself!

I'm glad everything's still on some site somewhere, but boy, what a mess!

[Ibthink]

The new site is still missing a heck of a lot of material — just look at the User Guide section, and there is even less selection for desktops!

The one thing that is missing is the type # database. But the userguides should be all available for desktops - the userguides you can´t find on the EOL site should be all on the new support.lenovo.com site: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product ... l-in-ones/ All userguides that are available here (http://download.lenovo.com/express/ug_t ... sktop.html) should be either on the EOL site or the regular support.lenovo.com.

For ThinkPads, the userguides were never available online until the Tx20 models as far as I know (http://download.lenovo.com/express/ug_t ... ebook.html) - which is why you won´t find them on the site.

[brchan]

It is refreshing to see Lenovo actually listen to its users for once. Hopefully they can do the same for the next-gen Thinkpads...

[dr_st]

So support1.lenovo.com seems to be down (redirected to some crap server). I think it's just their DNS that's expired, but it probably means they have no intent of renewing it, now that the EOL site is up.

Everything that was on support1.lenovo.com is still accessible at http://206.17.82.2 (for now), but some of the search mechanisms are broken, quick path is not working, etc.

The content pages can still be reached, for example by searching for thinkpad drivers and software site:http://206.17.82.2 (replace "thinkpad" with actual model type).

[FryPpy]

I want to find link under our forum name and can't but find this topic and all answers is here (EOL site).
I find all that i needed for T20. And find some interesting glitch - try this on EOL site:
Device Drivers File Matrix -> Type: Laptops & Tablets -> Series: ThinkPad S Series -> .... and you didn't find S30 or S31, but you find ThinkPad S51 Which is meant to be ThinkCentre S51
But where is S30?
I have send them feedback... let's see.

BTW
206.17.82.2 address is no more accessable

[Johan]

I want to find link under our forum name...

<rest snipped>

Try see here if you can find what you need there?

I know that forum owner Bill Morrow will restore this link shortly (and I guess that downloads then will become available for members only, but let's see how it turns out to be).

Johan

[jbarnes6500]

Can you please re-post the torrent. Seems broken and Lenovo has sent robots after archive.org. Why they had to go that far is beyond reason.

Thanks,
John

[ajkula66]

Can you please re-post the torrent. Seems broken and Lenovo has sent robots after archive.org. Why they had to go that far is beyond reason.

Thanks,
John

Welcome to the forum!

Just click on the "Drivers" link at the top of this page and proceed from there.

Good luck.

[twistero]

Hello everyone! It's been a long time.
Recently I got a few notifications about people wanting to download the original torrent file, since Google Drive has disabled old share links. Since presumably no one is seeding that torrent anymore - I certainly am not - the torrent file is probably not very useful.

Just to be sure, the "Drivers" link at the top of the forum page has everything contained in the original torrent, yes?