Thinkpads Forum

What would happen if I took the hard drive out of my T60p running Win XP, and put it into a P50. Would it work?

It would most likely bluescreen within seconds. The differences on hardware level are huge. I'm doubtful that P50 offers support on driver level for XP as well. Not an idea worth pursuing IMO.

Only time I use an older HDD in another laptop is as a data drive, usually via an Ultrabay adapter. HDD will be reformatted before use. I don't need the speed for data only.

Windows does not play well when switching between very different hardware, especially XP. Don't bother trying to swap HDDs.

However, this is usually no problem for Linux, as I have swapped drives from a T23 ->T43, and T61 intel -> T61 Nvidia -> W530 without issue.

I read an interesting discussion on a Windows 7 forum topic, where it explained the use of some software designed for this very purpose; Paragon Adaptive Restore 2010 which also works with XP and other operating systems: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/29 ... -swap.html

Official site here: https://www.paragon-software.com/techno ... verestore/

Most notably, there are no Intel drivers (e.g. disk or graphics) for XP on anything newer than Ivy Bridge systems and no XP drivers for Intel USB 3.0 ports. (Note that Renesas and ASMedia USB 3.x ports do have XP drivers.) I wouldn't count on XP being usable on Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake systems.

I actually did put a T42 Windows XP drive into a T23 and it worked, but newer to older usually works better than older to newer (I likewise tried a T42 XP drive on a T43 and it froze up and couldn't even get past the blinking cursor IIRC because T43/R52 use a different HAL under 2000/XP than older T4x/R5x)... generally, same-generation will work just fine (such as X60 to T60 or T400 to T500), one main problem however is video drivers (on XP or older) and disk drive controller drivers

I have a small (80GB) SATA hard drive with a minimal Windows 7 Basic 32-bit on it, mainly to test OEM Lenovo activations, flashing BIOS, etc. and it has not barfed on any of my T6x/T500/W500 machines no matter if it's Nvidia, ATI or Intel graphics (although IME, Windows 7 and up tend to be more accepting of drives being moved from one machine to another)

For the primary drive, the only time I ever do that is when I am installing a new OS, and blowing out the old one.
Secondary/data drives, I have reused without reformatting.