Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I have a T60p. I bought a new HDD for it (that I want to make it the main drive) and was wondering whether I can keep the old drive as a secondary.
I did the factory install on the new HDD from recovery discs so now I can boot from either of them.
I searched the forum and it seems one way to keep both is to install the old HDD in the DVD bay.
The questions are:

1) Is the DVD bay the only option? Did not find any thread about a second internal drive location but just want to make sure.
2) I guess I will need to buy the HDD drive bay caddy from the link above
3) Since both drives are bootable as of right now do I need to do anyting special for the old HDD to run in the drive bay?
4) Is the HDD in the drive bay hot swappable with the DVD?

Thanks for all your answers.

One more question:

It seems newmods US does not make a ultra bay HDD caddy for T60p so does anyone know where can I buy one from?

The old SATA (serial ATA) hard drive can be installed into the Ultrabay. What you would be looking for is an Ultrabay Slim SATA 2nd HDD (hard disk drive) adapter. You can find them on eBay for about $25 to $30. You could also get a USB external hard drive case and mount your old drive in there. However, the data transfer speed would probably be slower than the Ultrabay adapter.

From my personal experience, I would NOT run a bootable drive in the Ultrabay if there is also a bootable main drive. I had a bad result when doing this with a cloned drive so that's kept me from experimenting with dual Windows XP boot drives. The Ultrabay HD adapter should be hot-swappable but I've always shut down the system before removing/installing the HD adapter.

ref: eBay search "(IBM,Thinkp*,Leno*) (sec*,2n*) (adap*,cad*) (T6*,X6*) (serial,sata)"

edit: My initial eBay search was a little too restrictive with the terms. Another user just posted a better one but it disappeared after a couple of minutes. It had included PATA adapters but I've adjusted to only show SATA versions.

I just finished a dual hard drive install on my T60P. I purchased the hard drive bay adapter from Insight.com. IBM part # is 40Y8725. I had purchase a 320gb 7200 rpm 16mb cache WD Black hard drive and did a clean install of Win 7 Ultimate 64bit. I took my original 100 gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache hard drive and did a clean factory load on it. I put the the 100 gb in the ultra bay adapter and installed it with power off. Booted into bios and changed boot order so that Win 7 boots 1st with no boot order menu. If I restart and Thinkvantage comes up I press F12 key and hold key down until boot order phrase pops up at bottom of screen below Thinkvantage phrase. The boot order menu comes and then you can select which hard drive you want. It works and now I have 2 OS. Win 7 and Win XP Pro. My wife loves it because now she has here own computer and I have mine.