Thinkpads Forum

Hi All,

I recently bought an R61 that had XP pre-installed and was also supplied with Vista Business Recovery Disks.

What I'd like to know is if I can do the following?:-

1. Purchase an Ultrabay drive-caddy and put a new HDD into that.

2. Using an external USB cd-drive, use the Vista recovery disks to install Vista etc onto the drive in the Ultrabay, (i.e. without removing internal XP drive)

3. When desired, boot Vista in the Ultrabay by changing boot-order in the pre-boot bios setup.

I realise that this might be stretching things, and I also realise that I can temporarily replace my XP drive with the new one and recover Vista to that instead

If this is the best option, can I still then boot from the Ultrabay when desired?

Thanks and Regards

Hi,
I did it similar on my system. Basically not a big deal, you can select by F12 which HDD is the boot device.
But I would recommend to remove the orignial HDD doing the recovery, just to make sure that the recovery hits the right hdd and not overwrites the normal one ...

And I would use the same caddy sATA or pATA as the orignial drive interface is. than you even can install the system without an exernal DVD drive.

Hermann