HELP! Swapping hard drives and system won't find hardware!

[unkierob]

The hard drive on my recently R40 died, taking my version of XP with it (yes, I was too negligent to make recovery disks). So I bought a used R51 with a bad motherboard and am trying to use that ("new") hard drive in my R40. I had to re-activate the XP on the "new" drive which went fine, but I am still getting messages when I boot up that the system cannot find my VGA, Network, and Ethernet controllers. Even worse, the system cannot does not acknowledge the existence of my wireless radio at all!

(I have another hard drive with Ubuntu installed and the wireless works fine with that--though when using that drive, I can't access my CD/DVD, and there's no Linux driver for my printer, and the computer won't recover from hibernation, etc. . . . hence, why I'm trying to get back to XP.)

So, I've tried downloading the drivers from the Lenovo site onto the Ubuntu drive and then copying them onto the "new" XP drive, and then re-booting, but that doesn't seem to work--the "find driver" wizard won't allow me to direct it to the folder where I've copied the files. Or am I copying the wrong files or missing a step somewhere? Is there anyway I can make my wireless work with XP again?

My R40 is 2897-54U and the hard drive came out of a T51 2888-FMU.

Thanks!

-Rob in Baraboo

[RealBlackStuff]

Your R40 has ATI graphics, the R51 has integrated Intel graphics.
Using the R51 drive in the R40, you need to uninstall the Intel drivers first.
Then reboot and install the R40 ATI (and other missing) drivers from here:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/researc ... MIGR-46024

Just downloading/installing is not enough.
When you 'install' an IBM driver, all it does is extract files from the D/L-file to a location C:\Drivers\Something...
Write down this location when you 'install', then go there and run the Setup program from there.

[unkierob]

That's exactly what I tried to do, but it didn't seem to have any effect. I downloaded "Dual-Band 802.11ab and 802.11abg wireless LAN Mini PCI adapter" for XP, copied it onto the Windows drive, and then booted up with that drive and ran the .exe file from there, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

I'm concentrating on the wireless issue right now, since once I solve that, downloading other drivers should become much easier, but on the graphics front, are the integrated graphics a better system than ATI? Would I be better off moving the video card from the R51 to the R40? Or would that be a little beyond the skills of a relative novice?

Thanks for your help,

-Rob

[ajkula66]

You can't move the video card, it's soldered to the motherboard...

After extracting the downloaded wireless driver, you must go into C>Drivers>Win>Wlanath and run the setup file from there.

[Majestic]

Have you tried re-installing the chipset driver? Then re-install the remaining hardware drivers.

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa ... MIGR-46058


Also, is your USB working? If so, copy the driver downloads to a flash drive and run them from there.

[unkierob]

Success!! I re-installed the chipset drivers and then tried installing the wireless driver again and now the wireless is working!! I think I may still be missing a few drivers, but now that I can get online, I can use the lenovo auto-detect utility to make sure all my other software is up-to-date, right?

Thanks everybody for steering me in the right direction; I really appreciate it!

-Rob

[Majestic]

Just go into Windows Device Manager and check your hardware listing to see if any have a exclamation mark that would indicate a driver problem. If there are no exclamation marks then all your hardware and their drivers are working properly.