Thinkpads Forum

Due to the sound advice I got here when asking a questin and reading other threads I have ordered two T60's today (one for my wife, one for my son who is going to college).

My question: can I use an external usb harddisk to put the recovery data on or do I have to use cd's?

Regards
Stephan

Hi Stephan,

I am not sure with the built in programm, but you can do this if you have a "normal" image programm like acronis true image.
the first thing i did as i got my t60: installed true image, backuped the whole partition (acronis does compress it) to an external usb drive.
you can also restore the im age from an external usb drive, coz the t60 will support usb drives without windows...

Thanks for your reply. I have an old version of Acronis, so it might not support USB drives. One of the laptops has a dvd writer, the other a cd/dvd combo, so I hope to avoid having to burn 6-7 cd's.

Stephan

While the Rescue and Recovery program included with the ThinkPads is not that great a program, it will write backups to USB external drives.

Rescue and Recovery User’s Guide wrote:Copying backups from the hard drive: The Rescue and Recovery program enables you to use removable media to restore the contents of the hard disk in the event of a hard-disk drive failure. Media from which a backup can be restored includes CDR, DVD, USB hard-disk drive, second hard-disk drive, or network drive. Copying your backup files to removable media enhances backup protection and enables you to restore your system from any of your archived backups.

Sounds cool; will it also make it (the external hdd) bootable or I still need a spare CD for booting?

Using Rescue and Recovery will NOT make the external hard drive bootable. You need to use cloning software for that. Acronis True Image is frequently recommended by other users on this forum (I haven't tried it myself).

If you buy the 2nd hard disk drive adapter (to fit in the optical drive bay) from Lenovo, it comes with EZ-Gig cloning software. (At least the one I just received for my T42 came with it. AFAIK, the T60 uses a different adapter than the T4x.)

Hi, I'm using my IBM T42s (2373-K5H) and installed Rescue & Recovery v3.00.0025 (not the very latest one, but good enough).

-I've successfully created my R&R image on my bootable external USB hard drive.

-I've also left the same R&R image on my T42's internal HDD as well (although I believe there's an option to delete this from internal HDD, once you've also made the same to the bootable external USB hard drive.

-Please be aware that this process formats your bootable external USB hard drive, so you will use all data that's on it!

-You can boot off this bootable external USB hard drive into the R&R recovery environment, but don't think you can use DOS, Windows Safe Mode (what most people mean by boot off a device to access Windows...)

Good luck!