Thinkpads Forum

On my new T61p, I have a 160Gb SATA drive as primary and a 100Gb PATA drive that I keep in the Ultrabay. The 160Gb drive has WinXP preinstalled; the 100Gb drive has my Linux installation, which is what I use 90 percent of the time.

I'd like to swap the contents of these drives so that I can have more
room for Linux but not lose WinXP entirely.

This is my plan, and I'd like to ask some of you gurus to approve it:

(1) Use the ThinkVantage utility to make "Product Recovery" CDs for the stock 160Gb drive.

(2) Reformat the 160Gb drive, zapping everything including the hidden Recovery partition.

(3) Move my Linux installation from the 100Gb drive in Ultrabay to the 160Gb primary drive.

(4) Use my Product Recovery CDs to reformat and restore the factory installation of WinXP to the 100Gb drive in the Ultrabay.

Note: I have an external CD-DVD drive that connects via a USB port, so I can use the Recovery CDs even with a hard drive in the Ultrabay.

Does anyone see an gotchas in this plan? Also, will the Produce Recovery CDs reinstall the hidden Recovery partition, as well?

Thanks ever so much.

-dhave

If somebody smart doesn't answer in the next 5 minutes, then I'm just gonna go ahead and do it. I'm not kidding.

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Oh, no! What have I done?!

So long as you are using licensed software and you build the drives in the real drive area, it should work. I ran into problems at XP SP2 trying to use the same recovery on two drives so I could build one while in production on the other and then turfing the other.

However, you are using two different OS's, so it should work. What I don't know is what Linux will think of the setup because I have never tried that.

In short, my experience is too little to answer you.
... JDH

Well, I can report that the four-step procedure described in my first post was successful. A Linux installation is quite easy to transfer from one disk to another, and the product recovery disks did their job just fine.

My only regret is that I used CDs instead of DVDs for the recovery disks. I have one startup CD and eight recovery CDs -- reminiscent of the stack of floppies that you'd need for similar tasks in years past.