Thinkpads Forum

Greets all.

Got quite a few of the bugs worked out of my W500... thanks
to all who replied in the "Aaaargh" thread.

Now another nut to crack: dual booting Vista & XP on this
thing. Anyone out there have any luck with this?

My biggest concerns are:

1. no Vista media -- came preloaded of course -- so no DVD to
resort to should all go haywire.

2. the thinkpad software/drivers

can anyone point me to a walkthrough for this?

finally, legal issues aside, if I make recovery CD's with my
T60p (which has XPpro) -- could I use those as XP installation
disks for the dualboot setup? My reasoning here is: I may get a good XP install with all the right driver (or close enough) -- then
go back and register the functioning OS with MS as and get
a legal license for that installation.

Thoughts?
Thanks.
Tony

You should be able to burn a recovery DVD from your laptop before you start, in case all does go haywire. You will need to format the drive and partition it, so you will need XP and Vista install CDs. No, recovery CDs probably will not work for this, and the drivers aren't the same. You will lose everything off your hard drive if you do this, keep that in mind. I would recommend installing XP first, but that's a recommendation from someone who's only dual-booted XP and Ubuntu. You can use the XP CD to partition the hard drive. The one you use most will need the most room. I'm giving Vista only 30g when my t400 arrives. You will also need to find out if the Vista bootloader will allow XP as an option, but I'm pretty sure it will. The drivers you will need to download off lenovo.com after, but the swsetup folder on your C: should be backed up anyway. Make sure you select the right partition for each OS. Hope this helps, and good luck.

The above post pretty much covers it. A few points to make are:

Make recovery discs before doing anything!

Using recovery discs will delete any partitions on the hard drive and partition it to the stock Lenovo scheme.

Using recovery discs from another model may bring driver conflicts.

Yes, the Vista bootloader will allow XP. It is easier if XP is installed first. Then Vista will just see the XP install and add it to the boot loader. If you have Vista installed first Google for "easybcd" it will allow you to add XP to an existing Vista bootloader.

Get your drivers here before you start and put them on a cd or USB drive for easy access.

I would use the Lenovo Vista install that is already there. Resize the partition and install XP from a regular XP disc, then run "easybcd" to add it to the bootloader.

You may have to go into the BIOS and set the SATA to "compatibility" to make the hard drive visible to a regular XP cd.