Thinkpads Forum

I am considering the purchase of an X60t, which does not come with an optical drive. For everyday use i think I will be happy just using images or optical drives over the network, but what happens when I need a bootable device? Is there any way to get around buying an external optical drive?

My primary concern here is installing the Vista upgrade at some point in the future, is there any way to do this without an external optical drive?

I have access to an external floppy drive, a USB hard drive, and a DVD drive over the network.

Is there any way to do a network install of Vista from a non-vista computer?

I also have a T43; could I start the install of vista on my T43 and then swap the drive back to my X60t to finish the install? How difficult is it to get at these two drives?

Thanks for your help

An external DVD drive isn't that expensive. Especially if you don't care about creating DVDs or having a highly portable drive. There's probably some full size read-only DVD drive that would serve your purpose.

this was the first link Google showed for "external usb dvd"

http://www.etech4sale.com/Toshiba_Exter ... 40267.html

smvp6459 wrote:An external DVD drive isn't that expensive. Especially if you don't care about creating DVDs or having a highly portable drive. There's probably some full size read-only DVD drive that would serve your purpose.

this was the first link Google showed for "external usb dvd"

http://www.etech4sale.com/Toshiba_Exter ... 40267.html

Will the X60T boot off of any USB optical drive? I have a very old external HP cd burner and I was wondering if this would work.

It may, it can't hurt to try.

Even if you can't, you could probably create a floppy boot disk for some installations (not sure about Vista, though). I know 2000 and XP let you create a floppy system that would get you to a point where the CD could take over...I'm not sure if MS cares enough to provide that option anymore.

smvp6459 wrote:An external DVD drive isn't that expensive.

My USB DVD burner cost me only around $45, and it's bootable. It's huge though, and smaller ones would cost twice as much.

Can you tell if they are bootable before you buy? If a drive is bootable on one computer, will it be bootable on all?

Typically usb should be bootable. I haven't ran into a situation where it wasn't. Firewire typically is not for a PC. Mac's are firewire bootable