t43/t61 hard drive swap

[newt43]

Hi: Basic question here-- I have a t43 and am going to upgrade to a t61. I'm not relishing the prospect of porting all of my data to a new computer. Can I just pop my old t43 hard drive into the t61 and keep working? Is there any downside to this? Thanks!

[Harryc]

This will not work. The T43 uses IDE drives, the T61 SATA drives. Different connectors/architectures.

[newt43]

Thanks for your reply! Can I boot from my t43 IDE drive in the ultrabay?

[Brad]

You could run a program that makes a copy of your T43 drive and then will remove all the hardware information so that when you run your newly cloned drive in your new ThinkPad all the new hardware would then be recognized.

Acronis True Image with Universal Restore. This is an add on to the True Image program. There is more information here.

Brad

[Harryc]

Thanks for your reply! Can I boot from my t43 IDE drive in the ultrabay?

Yes, but knowing how XP is quirky when it comes to transporting the OS to a newer chipset, hardware, etc, it may not boot properly. Be prepared to backup your data before you do anything and also be prepared to use the existing XP install loaded on the T61. Seems to me you'd want to take advantage of the newer basic load/drivers/utilities, etc anyway, or at least to try them before you decide to do some cleanup. How hard is just data transfer when the OS and drivers are already setup?

[pae77]

Imo, this would be a great opportunity to embrace the future by getting a new machine with Vista preloaded, especially now that SP1 is just a few weeks away from being made available to all via windows update (or even can be obtained now, with a little effort). I know it's popular to bash Vista but honestly, there is nothing to be afraid of, and it is a huge advance over XP. I was a very early adopter of XP and loved it for years, but after 2 months of using Vista (x64 version even) now I couldn't imagine going back to XP. And now with SP1, a very good thing has been made even better.

There is a very easy to use transfer utility that comes with Vista that enables you to easily move over programs, files and settings from the old machine to the new one using your choice of a variety of media. Personally, however, I would recommend a clean install of all apps on a new Vista box and then just use the above mentioned Vista Files and settings transfer utility to move most data files over from the old XP box to the new machine using an external hard drive or other media. That's what I did when moving from my T42p running XP to the T61p with Vista and it worked quite well for most things, like documents, music, pictures. A few other things (like Quicken data files, Firefox profile and Outlook pst files) I backed up and transfered manually or using other specialized backup/transfer apps (like e.g., the FEBE extension for Firefox).

[Brad]

There is a very easy to use transfer utility that comes with Vista that enables you to easily move over programs, files and settings from the old machine to the new one using your choice of a variety of media. Personally, however, I would recommend a clean install of all apps on a new Vista box and then just use the above mentioned Vista Files and settings transfer utility to move most data files over from the old XP box to the new machine using an external hard drive or other media. That's what

I didn't know the utility will move programs. That could be very handy.

Brad