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Purchased a Thinkpad T41 (2373-7FU) from AffordableComputers.com in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 2007. This company offers used and refurbished laptops with no operating system (hard drive wiped); Windows XP Home can be added for $90, Windows XP Pro for $149. I bought mine with no operating system.
I installed Windows 2000 even though the example delivered had a BIOS password. Didn't want that restriction; AffordableComputers did not know the password and agreed to replace my example with another. So I backed up my Windows 2000 installation with Acronis True Image Home (version 10) and returned the computer.
While waiting for the replacement T41 (which turned out to have even more warranty left than the first example---through January 2008) I found out about the HPA. I'm glad I didn't pay Affordable Computers to install Windows XP Pro for $149! I used the HPA and had my "new" T41 running XP in a couple of hours, then I installed SP2 and other updates.
After XP was setup to my satisfaction (updates, applications, etc.) I backed it up using Acronis True Image Home.
I soon tired of only 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive. The RAM upgrade was of course simple. In 10 minutes my T41 went from 512MB to 1.5GB. I ordered a 7200 rpm 100GB Seagate Momentus drive from Newegg.com, and spent a lot of time on this forum learning how to transfer the HPA to the Seagate drive. I used the procedures in Instructions on How to Copy the HPA to a New Drive (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=13814).
I followed these steps:
1. I used FWBACKUP to copy the HPA to a ca. 5GB FAT32 partition on my old, 40GB IBM (Fujitsu) hard drive. BootIt NG made the 5GB partition.
2. Copied the HPA from the Fujitsu to a USB Western Digital 2.5" external hard drive.
3. Installed the new Seagate drive (unpartitioned) in the T41.
4. Plugged the WD 2.5" external hard drive into the T41.
5. Plugged a 1GB USB flash drive into the T41. This drive was setup as a Windows 98 boot disk, so that I could run FDISK.
6. After booting the T41 from the USB flash drive, I ran FWRESTOR from the 2.5" external hard drive where resided the files created in step 1. The HPA was successfully created on the new Seagate drive!
7. Finally, I used Acronis True Image Home to restore XP to the new hard drive. XP booted fine.
Now comes the hard part.
I wanted a larger hard drive so I could dual boot XP and Windows 2000. I made a new partition (FAT32) on the hard drive, and restored 2000 to it. I modified the XP boot.ini file to point to 2000 in its (3rd) partition. Windows 2000 hung during the boot process.
So I did a fresh install of Windows 2000 on the E: drive. After installing 3 or 4 software packages (ethernet drivers, WiFi drivers, etc.), I decided I didn't want all the work of reinstalling the IBM software, Windows updates, and applications.
I finally realized that Windows 2000 (the version restored with Acronis True Image Home) was looking for its files on C: instead of E:, so I decided, congratulating myself for my insight, after reinstalling the Acronis backup of my original installation of Windows 2000 (thereby destroying Windows 2000 as freshly-installed on drive E:), to use System Commander 7.0.
I installed System Commander, rebooted and was greeted with boot error 0-00 messages. "Fixed" the problem by replacing the MBR (using System Commanders "checkmbr /mbr" command) and
re-enabled System Commander. The problem returned. Another problem was that System Commander mucked up my wireless (Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI adapter)---I couldn't power it on. I removed System Commander, and, surprise, my wireless came back!
With System Commander in the trash, I turned to BootIt NG (version 1.81), which installed easily, interfered not with WiFi, and allowed BOTH Windows installations to boot easily.
Whew! I'm glad that's over, and glad that I bought a T41!
