Thinkpads Forum

Seasons greetings, everyone. Perhaps someone can help me through a senior moment? I've finally managed to source a 701ds. It came without hard drives, but I have purchased two Samsung SSDs to replace them with. I've also downloaded images of recovery disks from the Internet Archive. Now the next step...

I've done this before on other units (T400, X201) but it was ages ago. I can't recall how to make the SSDs bootable! I recall altering the boot order in the BIOS (which is the latest official version) to use either CDs or thumb drives to help out along the way, but I'm drawing a blank on what to do next. I'd like to install Windows 7 first with the original drivers and then upgrade to W10.

Any hints would be appreciated: thanks in advance.

You need a Windows installation media on DVD or USB, and to boot from that. Then during the installation process, it will make the SSD bootable.

You can download Windows and the tool to make the bootable CD from Microsofts website.

I've dug out an old thumb drive and it's off to the races. Thanks to the mods for a rapid response! I surprise myself sometimes

Update: Ive managed to boot into Win 7 from a thumb drive previously created for that purpose.

However I can't seem to create bootable media (using PowerISO for instance) from the links to the Lenovo recovery media ISOs downloadable here: https://archive.org/details/03W6413

There are two disks. I should be able to boot from one and then when prompted insert the other to add applications and drivers, right?

Or am I missing something?

Cheers...

OS 1 is the bootable os installer and the other one is everything else.

Yes I can get the system to boot onto the Recovery image on the thumb drive (Lenovo Rescue & Recovery v4), but the system hangs when it attempts to find the SSD. I'll post a screenshot later. Rgds...

Have you tried an external USB CD/DVD drive?
Also, because of the W701ds age, try to initialize those SSDs first for MBR in another laptop.
See e.g. this.

Thanks - disk management indicates that they have been initialised with MBR. I'll try the external USB DVD option once I can get to one of my storage boxes...

Using an external USB DVD drive gets me started. However answering "No" when prompted to insert a Supplemental disk (there's only the Recovery and Apps / Drivers disks in this set) ends the recovery but leaves me with a "BOOTMGR is missing" error on restart.

I'll do some more Googling... again, comments are greatly appreciated.

Merry Christmas!

I've done some more playing around and Windows 7 Disk Management reports the following from the SSD after its been through the recovery process (although the blue progress bars would imply that this perhaps hadn't completed). The recovery DVDs work from both the internal and an external DVD-RW drive.

SYSTEM_DRV (G:) 1.17GB NTFS Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)
Windows7_OS (E:) 920.09GB NFTS Healthy (Primary Partition)
Lenovo_Recovery (F:) 9.76GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
500MB Unallocated

The Properties Tab confirms the Disk is an MBR volume.

I feel its moving closer: but clearly the Boot information is not being written onto the SSD...

Again, any thoughts appreciated, best wishes for 2025!

Put the new SSD in another, newer laptop and do the install there, then put it in the W701ds.

PS: make the Windows partition maybe 40GB and format the rest for storage.

I have a range of Windows laptops of varying ages and I have tried that out. On the more recent ones, the Recovery DVD boots the machine, but falls short of loading the licence terms page in the Rescue & Recovery environment (choosing to reboot the machine instead). This happens when the DVD Recovery media is loaded into either the internal DVD drive or the external one (with corresponding changes made to the boot order in the BIOS at the start of the exercise).

In simple terms, it looks like the Recovery process is not ccompleting fully / putting the boot files into the appropriate partition. Cheers

Progress! Of a sort, after another go this weekend.

As a precaution, I burned the recovery materials from the Internet Archive at single speed onto 2 DVDs (bootable for the first, non-bootable for the second).

Putting them through the grinder allows a full load of the recovery files and boot into W7 (from an external DVD drive from the era).

Then there's further messages about stuff, but that will do me for now!

Cheers

A bit late to the party but I was wondering if your W701DS worked correctly after the OS installation. I too downloaded the two ISO files and burned it onto a DVD , I was able to restore my w701ds but unfortunately the second screen is not working. I am not sure if I am missing a file or if I am having a hardware issue. I got the laptop pre-installed with windows 10 pro and the screen did not worked but I could get it to turned on by plugging and unplugging a second monitor. I thought I was missing a file and so I restored the laptop to Windows 7 using the recovery disk mentioned above but now the second screen won't turn on even when I plug in an additional monitor (it just flickers for a second). If you have any ideas on what to do next I would really appreciate your input.

I have one of these with the original software on one of the disks. The second screen works OOTB with the original Windows 7 Lenovo software and with Windows 10/11 with the correct Nvidia driver installed.