Thinkpads Forum

I am planning on purchasing a new X200s for school. I am aware that these computers don't come with DVD/CD drives and I am planning on taking advantage of the "Upgrade to Windows 7 Special" that Lenovo is offering. After reading the details of the offer from windows, I learned that they are going to mail DVD's with the operating system and DVD's with the Thinpad drivers on them. I would like to know if it will be easy to create .iso files and run them with DEAMON tools. I am aware of DEAMON tools and have used it to run .iso files. However, I have never created my own .iso file from a DVD/CD. Could someone with an X200 share their experiences with updating operating systems from DVD/CD's without the optical drive.

You will most not be able to simply use drive emulation software like Daemon. It might, but it would require Windows 7 to completely copy needed setup files off of the disc and onto the hard drive. My guess however is that the DVD will still be required and that's impossible to do with Daemon when you've rebooted the computer and Windows 7 is being setup outside the Vista operating system.

You should either buy a USB adapter for IDE/SATA drives or buy an external enclosure and just put a drive in yourself.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos ... _a_usb_key
You can also use an external hard drive.

Or you could try buying one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-USB-DSC5- ... 766&sr=1-1

Thanks alot b0yd07 and visionviper. That was exactly what I was looking for.

I'm not sure how different the BIOS is from the X200T but so far all of the betas and RC have booted from a flash drive. I did mount the beta W7 first on my desktop and copied but for the RC I just burned it to a DVD and copied all the files over to the flash drive. Worked great. I had problems doing that with Vista. Only got it to work twice out 7 attempts

I'll be trying again when the RTM is out as well. Would be nice if Lenovo had a PDF of the BIOS that explained a little bit what the different settings did.

Just install Win7 via a USB flash drive. I installed Win7 RC1 via a flash drive onto my X200s successfully.