Thinkpads Forum

My Dell inspiron B130 up and quit, no lights, no nothing. I removed the hard drive and mounted it in my Rockfish enclosure and attached it to my T60 and everything is there. Is there some easy way to get everything moved over to the IBM? ie, none of my old apps work because they are installed in the old system.

Well, the Dell HD has an IDE interface, and the T60 has SATA, so there is no chance of just swapping the drives. In order to use the old programs you'd have to reinstall them on the T60's drive. You can obviously reuse and move over files and folders from one drive to another, but not programs. If you want to move the entire image over then there is a possibility. Get cloning software like Acronis True image. Find another Dell B130 or the similar Inspiron 1300 and install your drive in it. Then prepare the old drive like this link says to do; http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html
Remove the drive and put it in an external USB enclosure. Make a bootable CD from the Acronis TI program in another computer. Boot it up in the T60 and then clone the old Dell drive to the drive in the T60 or another new drive. How badly do you want to do this .

Harry, I do have a T42 and T43 (IDE's) I could use, does that change the answer? How bad do I want to do this, well I don't want to do it at all it's just the fact that so much is lost. Should I just keep the drive handy and in an usb enclosure and when I can't find something go looking for it? Dell motherboards are pretty cheap refurbished etc on ebay.

The issue is that you have to make the changes in the registry before you boot the drive in a new machine. Therefore you'd need a B130 to do that. You may get lucky that the drive will just boot in a T42...try it. Chances are that it will blue screen. The T43 would be more of a long shot because of it's hybrid drive controller and differing hardware abstraction layer. I didn't mention it but you did...actually repairing your own B130 is another solution, and perhaps the best solution if the programs are that important. Let me ask you, are some of these programs not available anymore, is that the concern?

Harry, I'll give it a try in the T42 and T43, nothing to lose I guess. Turbotax and Poker Tracker are on it, not going to use last years turbotax unless something goes south and Poker Tracker I can just get a new registration key for by writing the developers. So I guess it's really not a big deal, I can go into my docs and start dragging things over.

Update: Tried the drive in the T42 and T43 and no luck, I think I got a dell website across the top then something about a PBR and it stopped, same for both machines