Downgrading my T61 from Vista to XP

Message

dinglydoo · #1 Post by **dinglydoo** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:25 pm

Hello,

I have had my Thinkpad T61 since late August and I can't say that I am fully happy with the performance of my machine. I occasionally get lock ups and such, and after searching through these forums I found a fix for it, but just recently after installing new drivers, I got an error saying winload.exe cannot be found, corrupt or lost etc. I somehow managed to extract the files from the Rescue and Recovery that Lenovo offers. I would now like to downgrade my T61 to an XP. I am still getting the winload.exe error, but I can still access BIOS. So can you please tell me what I have to do to go through with this, and what I will lose in the process in terms of Thinkpad software.
Thank you.

dinglydoo · #2 Post by **dinglydoo** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:34 pm

I just called Lenovo and they cannot send me the downgrade discs because I only have Vista Home Premium. so my question is, can I just purchase Windows XP Pro/Home and install it on the computer and do a full reformat/install and have everything work?
Thank you

mgo · #3 Post by **mgo** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:17 pm

dinglydoo wrote:I just called Lenovo and they cannot send me the downgrade discs because I only have Vista Home Premium. so my question is, can I just purchase Windows XP Pro/Home and install it on the computer and do a full reformat/install and have everything work?
Thank you

Yes, you can do that, but get ready for a lot of work, and you will need three or four hours to get everything up and running.

Before you install the new version of Windows make sure you have downloaded the necessary drivers and other features from the lenovo site for your machine and save them to a USB drive or some other media so you can install those things after installing XP.

Before you do all this work, have you tried to just run Rescue & Recovery and restore your machine back to factory spec? This ought to correct your problems.

Then, you can go in and uninstall the ThinkPad programs you don't want to run, and tweak on Vista to speed it up. (like get rid of Aero, etc)

With minimal work, Vista can run pretty well, but you need to know what to trim and what to keep. We can help with that.

dinglydoo · #4 Post by **dinglydoo** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:34 pm

I feel like shooting myself in the head right now since this is what I attempted to do a few hours ago:
"Then I looked around the rescure and recovery disk a little more closely. I realized from what I was reading that this was running Windows RE (or maybe it's Windows PE). And it had an Opera browser.

From the browser, I figured out I could run any executable. Just Open, select "all files," then right click on the executable you're interested. Select Run as Administrator. You can even create short cuts and edit them to add parameters. Though you can also just run a cmd.exe, so maybe that's not necessary. One key is that running from a ram drive partition that you'll see there (X is much more productive. I couldn't get the c: cmd.exe to run...

I tried doing a checkdsk c: /f with no luck.

Then I started playing with BootRec.exe. I didn't want to do BootRec.exe /fixboot c:, though in retrospect this might have been the right thing to do.

Instead, I did a BootRec.exe /rebuildbcd.

I rebooted. At first I thought, No Dice. The "error in winload.exe" and 0xC0000255 came up again. So I rebooted back to the recovery partition... hitting F11 at the ThinkPad screen...

And a curious thing happened...

My windows Vista boot came up. I could log in normally. My system was running normally."

After I did that, the problem still persisted and now I can't even access the Rescue and Recovery aspect of my Thinkpad! I can't believe I did that and I'm hoping there is a way I can fix this.
Also, why do you say that I should be ready for a lot of work if I install Windows Home? If I do not really care about the Thinkpad features such as the Fingerprint reader, backup etc, do I really need to install it for the computer to work properly?
Thanks again for the help.

Brad · #5 Post by **Brad** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:49 pm

I think he means that things like the wireless adapter and NIC will not be installed and not some of the other bloatware.

You can get the Windows XP disks. Place a WTB/LF topic in the marketplace.

Brad

eecon · #6 Post by **eecon** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 2:19 am

Brad wrote:I think he means that things like the wireless adapter and NIC will not be installed and not some of the other bloatware.

You can get the Windows XP disks. Place a WTB/LF topic in the marketplace.

Brad

I must have missed something here, but can't you get Lenovo to sell you the T61 WinXP recovery disks for your model? Send me a PM with complete model number and specs .... maybe I can help you out (our machines except for XP sound similar).

pae77 · #7 Post by **pae77** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 3:09 am

Sounds like your original Vista installation is corrupted. I would either do an upgrade (repair) to the same OS with a Vista installation disk or do a clean install from rescue and recovery. If you got a good uncorrupted installation of Vista, you probably would be happy with it.

Brad · #8 Post by **Brad** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 3:35 am

I must have missed something here, but can't you get Lenovo to sell you the T61 WinXP recovery disks for your model? Send me a PM with complete model number and specs .... maybe I can help you out (our machines except for XP sound similar).

Yes of course you can purchase the XP recovery CD's from Lenovo. You may spend less in the forum was my point.

Brad

#9 Post by **ryengineer** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 5:41 am

eecon wrote:I must have missed something here....snip

The point of the OP is his/her machine is not a "Qualified system" for Windows XP downgrade.

Downgrading my T61 from Vista to XP

Downgrading my T61 from Vista to XP

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