Only have 2 recovery disks and not for my originally installed OS- what to do?

[gravy robber]

My T500 originally came with XP installed. I only have 2 original white Lenovo recovery disks: Disk 1- Start Recovery Disk and Disk 2- Operating System Recovery Disk Windows Vista Business SP1 32 bit that came with it. I don't have either the Applications and Drivers or supplemental disks it asks for.

I had burned a set of recovery disks with Rescue and Recovery in XP, but either the disks I have aren't from that (poorly labeled them) or have been corrupted. The hard drive was the original point of failure so no backup partition. If I insert disk 1 from my burned recovery disks after factory Vista Disk 2 when it needs the Applications and Drivers recovery disk, the error says: "the product recovery disc set is not supported in combination with an Operating System Recovery Disc set" so I'm pretty sure that those are the ones I burned to recover XP, but they don't boot.

How can I get the original lenovo factory install for the least amount of money possible? I'll take either XP or Vista but would prefer XP.

[theterminator93]

I have XP Pro image files on my server for the T400/T500.

If you want to download them and see if they work, let me know. They're fairly large (about 5.5 GB in total), so if you prefer I could upload them to Google Drive first.

[MikalE]

You can also download and burn the .iso image for whatever key code you have. It's not a big deal (unless you don't have a second computer) to load the OS from an .iso, dowload and manually install the Wi-Fi driver, and let Lenovo do the rest.

After getting connected to the internet again, visit Lenovo and download all of the drivers for your system.

[jronald]

My son's T500 flies with 4gig of ram and W7.
With XP on the way out, why not SLIC2.1 the machine and Load W7?

Ron