Some recovery help for a T41 please :)

[Jules Tohpipi]

I have bought a used T41 off eBay which doesn’t have a hard-drive nor any recovery CDs (auction did explain this). It’s also out of warranty. Can anyone help me with some questions please:

1. I’ll ask a stupid question first. I already own a second fully working T41. Can I temporarily swap the hard drive out of my existing T41 into the ‘eBay T41’ to boot up and check that it’s working ? Will there be any ill effects when the hard drive is returned back again ?

2. I’m very confused if my original T41 actually has the hidden partition or if I can use it to create some recovery discs. The IBM pre-load area seems to appear in the Bios (normal, secure, disable) but I can’t find a way to create recovery discs in Windows, Access IBM or anywhere.

3. I’ve searched on eBay for recovery discs for the T41, but can’t find any. Am I perhaps entering the wrong terms, or perhaps there aren’t any for sale at the moment ? Or does anyone have any links please ?

Any help very gratefully received !

Many thanks
Jules

[SlamX]

If the two T-41's have identical hardware the hard drive most likely will boot in the new T-41

However you don't really need a recovery set for the new T-41. You can just do a fresh install of XP on a new hard drive for it.

Or you can clone the other T-41 hard drive to a new hard drive and put that in the new T-41

If you just do a fresh XP install you can just get all the drivers from the IBM site and install them on the new T-41

[Jules Tohpipi]

Many thanks for your reply and help.

If I clone the hard drive from my 1st T41 and use it in the 2nd T41, then will I run into Windows XP licensing issues ? Or is there a way to re-register with the 2nd T41's Windows key ?

[SlamX]

Should not run in to any problems as the XP version is OEM and is pre-activated on computers that use OEM vs retail versions of XP.