X61 Hard Disk Replacement

[AJM]

I am trying to help my neighbour get his X61 going with a new larger HD.
He does not have any restore CD's, so we are trying a fresh install with a new (retail) copy of XP.
Unfortunately it seems that it is not possible to boot off the external CD and setup XP: reading around it seems that the X61 has a bug that prevents this working - is this always correct?
I tried doing XP setup in another laptop, but when I switch the HD across to the X61, all I get is "A read error has occurred" whether I try AHCI or compatibility mode.
I also thought about cloning the old HD to the new large one in another system but I cannot access the HD in another PC - it asks for a password which he doesn't know.
BTW he has what I assume is only a user password, required to boot the system, but not what I assume is the administrator password required to change most of the bios settings.
Any pointers where to go next?
Thanks! AJM

[Harryc]

Well, you'll definitely have to set the SATA controller to compatibility mode in BIOS unless you have the correct drivers to feed the XP installer. I am not aware of any issues with booting an external CD drive on an X61. Have you set the external CD drive to first in boot order (startup) in BIOS? If yes, what happens if you hit F12 when you see the first boot screen? Is the CD drive on the boot list? Can you select it?

[AJM]

Well this is embarrassing as Firefox sometimes says... it was many steps ago that I originally tried booting from the external CD (tried two different ones, even) so I thought I would do it again just to remind myself what the error message was... and hey presto it worked fine. Not sure what I was doing wrong then...
If you have any pointers to the best resources for drivers let me know, I'll be back on this task later.

Thanks for taking the time, I've noted in the forum that you help a lot of people!

[Harryc]

Just install Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 SP1 or later and Lenovo System Update, which will pull in all the drivers, tools, etc. from Lenovo.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... pdate.html

[AJM]

Thanks, that's really neat and worked a treat. It's all up and running now.