Thinkpads Forum

My daughter will be a college freshman inthe fall. We are looking at a T61. Here school has told Lenovo to create the discounted offerings in Win XP only. I am thinking about getting the XP box and then upgrading to Vista. One of the nice things about the Thinkpad is the restore partition to factory specs with the ThinkVantage button if she hoses things. Is it possible to create a new restore partion if I install Vista? If so, can someone point me to instructions as to how to do this. I can see an advantage if this is possible as it would be cool to create a restore partition after Office and the basic software stack is installed.

I maybe able to help. It depends on what you wish to do.

It's possible to set your thinkpad up to dual boot into both XP and Vista. Or it's possible to wipe the hard drive, and then install Vista.

The partition you want to save will be seen as about 4.6 GB partition, sometimes called service001 or sometimes as EISA.

You can save this partition.

If she saves a copy of her system to say an external USB drive she can restore from that drive. If she simply saves to the hard drive, and needs to do a full factory reinstall, she will only reinstall the XP OS. Are you with me here? There are different options as to the restore options.

Does this help any?

Thank you. What is was really hopng to accomplish is ugrade to Vista and never come back to XP. The cost of the student T61 with all of the bells and whistles, 256 MB graphics card, 100 GB 7200 rpm disk and 2 GB of memory as well as a student cost of $49 for the top of the line Vista license from the university beats any thing I can configure at the Lenova site with Vista by a few hundred dollars. I would love to be able to lay down Vista and Office and at that point overlay the partition that the Blue Thinkvatage button uses. That way she could hose her system and as long as she has backed up her files, we could restore the Vista load by just holding down the blue button and rebooting. That way I can avoid a drive of a couple of hundred miles each way or a phone call stepping her through shuffling disks for a rebuild. I am just looking to see if there is a way to do this.

Rescue and Recovery should help here.

If there's enough disk space, you can make a backup using that. As long as the machine can boot, you can recover any of those backups.

An alternative is to use a real backup tool that can recover from "bare metal" as they say. An external drive is an excellent backup tool.

If you're really worried about the machine getting trashed, have her save all her data on a flash drive too. Ensure her account does not have administrator privileges.

whizkid wrote:... An external drive is an excellent backup tool....

-And may I suggest a copy of Acronis True Image, especially as you can very easily restore specific files. (I try and make an image back up of my daughter's T42 when she is at home from University, as well as regularly using True Image for my T43.)

True image can also get you back into shape faster than rescue and recovery. My experience shows that Acronis can restore your system in .5 to 1 hour while rescue and recovery takes multiple hours, and it still works (from a cd) after a hard drive failure.