Procedure to downgrade X61s to windows XP?

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politicorific · #1 Post by **politicorific** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:25 am

I posted a thread on notebookreview with all the pictures of my x61s, but it got lost in a sea of threads regarding its larger brethren.

Yesterday I began migrating my files from my older(3 month old Toshiba w/a celeron M430 1.7ghz, faster hard drive, and 1gb of memory) and ran the recovery cd to put a fresh factory installed state on the machine. The machine had came with vista, but I could not believe how slow it was operating - I had even doubled the installed ram. I ended up reinstalling XP since the machine was barely usable - windows vista had rated it a 2.0 due to horrible graphics performance.

That has me thinking about what amount of performance (and battery) is wasted on my X61s. I would like to attempt to install windows xp, but there is some trouble with this:

It didn't come with a recovery cd, just a hidden partition. Then there's the issue of drivers and then IBM utilities. I'd assume the power utilities are available, but what about keyboard function keys, hard drive shock protection and so on? I recall reading that some of the foreign websites offer the x-series with XP.

What steps would be preferable?

Here is my plan so far:

1) Get a fairly large external usb drive
2) Clone/ghost the factory drive
3) Disable onboard hard drive to ensure external drive behaves normally
4) compress or reghost factory drive and split into smaller, burnable dvd images
5) ....

from here I'm unsure where to go, should I wipe the drive completely or everything except the recovery partition?

I don't have a spare 2.5" drive laying around, although I could use my other notebooks drive for a short while to see how it goes.

Is there someone braver than me out there - usually I'd have no problem wiping and reinstalling to my hearts content, but that was with less "professional" hardware.

#2 Post by **GomJabbar** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:39 am

First things first. Burn yourself a set of Product Recovery Discs for Vista. Go to Start > All Programs > ThinkVantage > Rescue Media > Product Recovery. This will restore Vista, all your preinstall factory software, and the hidden partition. Use one CD/R for the first disk, and a DVD +-R for the second (or you can use all CD/R's).

Next, make a backup of your pre-installed programs from C:\IBMTOOLS\ as per following page.

How to backup the preloaded software applications - ThinkPad General

Now you can install Windows XP.

Next, get all your XP drivers from the following page.

Drivers and software - ThinkPad X61, X61s

Antioch · #3 Post by **Antioch** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 3:13 pm

Can you pull Win XP install files out of a Vista pre-loaded X61 machine? Rather, can you install XP from the hidden folders on a Vista X61? Or do you have to go out and buy a retail copy?

politicorific · #4 Post by **politicorific** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:55 pm

antioch, I'm using a student copy of XP to reinstall along with a USB cd rom (as long as it gets recognized)

thanks GomJabbar, it took 3 DVDs to burn everything and hopefully I don't need them. The IBMTOOLS directory didn't exist, so I just copied 1.5gb of data off from 2 other folders

Lenovo sure made it a pain to download all those drivers.

politicorific · #5 Post by **politicorific** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 5:47 pm

Agh! I need to slipstream SATA drivers since it can't find my disk.

Hopefully the guides I've found are good enough

#6 Post by **GomJabbar** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 6:10 pm

politicorific wrote:The IBMTOOLS directory didn't exist, so I just copied 1.5gb of data off from 2 other folders

Lenovo sure made it a pain to download all those drivers.

The IBMTOOLS directory has been on ThinkPads for years. I guess it is not surpising that Lenovo would rename it at some point in time. You might look for a directory off of C:\ that has subdirectories named something like \APPS & \drivers & OSFIXES & utils. The main thing is to get any commercial software installation programs saved to a CD or DVD because these are not downloadable from Lenovo. If you have these saved somewhere, you can reinstall them on your XP install.

Here is another link that might prove useful. It is not exactly your model, but enough of the hardware is similar, that much of it should apply.
Installation instructions for Windows XP - ThinkPad T60, T60p

EDIT: I forgot to comment on the 2nd part of what you wrote above. You can download System Update and let it retrieve the drivers for you. On the drivers page I linked to in a previous post, look under Notes: for ThinkVantage System Update. Personally I prefer to download and install the drivers manually, but many prefer the automated feature of System Update.

#7 Post by **Kyocera** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 6:44 pm

use compatibility mode.

pull Win XP install files out of a Vista pre-loaded X61 machine? Rather, can you install XP from the hidden folders on a Vista X61? Or do you have to go out and buy a retail copy

no such file in a Vista preload, maybe an upgrade. You need a retail version with it's own product key.

politicorific · #8 Post by **politicorific** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:05 pm

So far so good

Compatibility mode did the trick, now this thing is flying

I'll try the thinkvantage update in a bit, just letting windows get a few more updates, it's stalled on the ThinkPad Power Manager Setup

atarimaster · #9 Post by **atarimaster** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 4:53 pm

lol ... apparently i did it the wrong way ..... i installed windows xp within 2 minutes of opening the box ... never even got the chance to boot vista

i just downloaded and installed the drivers, and in about an hour i had a fully functional x61 ... now i need to download the linux drivers so i can get slackware up and running

Procedure to downgrade X61s to windows XP?

Procedure to downgrade X61s to windows XP?

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