Thinkpads Forum

Sorry for the long post. I'm making up for not being here much over the last several years....

Sometime next week I will receive a heavily discounted X201 Tablet. It's pretty much loaded with all of the available options but has a standard spinning hard drive. This tablet laptop will replace an aging T400 laptop with a solid state drive that in it's somewhat early retirement will probably become a knock about computer for my kids at home. I would like to swap the hard drives, putting the SSD in the new tablet and the spinning HDD into the T400. My inclination is to just take each drive out, swap them between laptops, turn on each laptop and see what happens. Am I crazy? Assuming I can get online, it seems to me that I will be able to update the various drivers and get both laptops to a good place.

Will this work? Is there some gotcha that I'm missing? An other advice?

Both machines will be using Windows 7. The T400 also has an internal Verizon WWAN card that I will move to the X201 Tablet.

For the record this swap became necessary because of a very poor Lenovo EZServe experience with the in warranty T400.

warmstrong wrote:Will this work?

Yes. Two points:
1) Before swapping the drives, i.e., while each machine still has an Internet connection, download on each drive the Intel Chipset drivers and the wired LAN drivers of the target machine, i.e., the machine to which you will move the drive. Once each drive is in its new "home", install the Intel Chipset drivers and the wired LAN drivers, and then each machine will be able to download remaining drivers, etc.

2) The standard X201 BIOS will not accept (almost certainly!) the Verizon WWAN card from the T400 ... and a modified BIOS for the X201 does not exist.

Good luck!

what you could do: with rescue and recovery you can make backups from both drives, put them on an external (USB) HDD. also with R&R, you can make that disk bootable. now, swap the drives, boot the USB drive, put the backups back in the right laptop. so, place the backup from the T400 on the mechanical drive in the T400, and the backup from the x201 back in the x201.

I have read the suggestion that with an SSD and Windows 7, you are better off installing from scratch, as Windows 7 will optimize to your SSD. I would check around for comments on this point. Additionally, it may be that the two machines are different enough that one may not boot with the other's installation on the drive. You will probably know pretty quick - boot error or blue screens. I installed Windows 7 from scratch on my X60s w/ SSD and with all of the Lenovo drivers etc. downloaded and installed, it is now running like a top.

Mike

Daniel Bakker's suggestion is the most feasible, as windows will have to be reactivated otherwise. Generally you will get a hodgepodge of drivers if you take the hard drive of one system and insert into a different system.

Regarding your WWAN, make sure that the module is whitelisted for the x201t otherwise the device won't boot.