Thinkpads Forum

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.

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.

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.

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