Thinkpads Forum

My dad is running an older I series thinkpad. I thought I would give him a slight upgrade and give him one of the 600e's I recently bought in the forum classifieds. To make things simple, and so I don't have to transfer all his programs to the new HD, I thought I could just switch hard drives and he could have all his files & programs. The problem is, the 600e won't boot with his old HD.

The Windows 2000 screen pops up and as the status bar starts moving at the bottom of the screen, it goes to a blue screen and says it can't boot. I can't remember the exact wording of the error. I'll go over and try it tonight and see if I can post the exact error message.

In the mean time, does anyone know some things I could try, or should I just leave the 600e HD in and transfer all his files over to the new HD? I have an ultrabay HD adapter, so I hope I can do the transfer easily that way? I've never used it before. Can I simply just copy files & programs & move them over, or do I need to use a ghost or clone program to move them over?

Thanks.

The chipsets are different between the 600E and the i series. NT versions of Windows (NT4, 2000, XP) install the OS based on the chipset specific to that computer. If you move the hard drive to another computer or motherboard with a different chipset, NT versions of Windows will blue screen on you. You can perform a repair install of Windows (I think that is possible with 2000) using the same install CD. That will reinstall Windows 2000, but make it work like you did nothing to it, though you will need to install all the updates.

Windows 95/98/ME and Windows Vista do not have this problem.

Stargate199 wrote: Windows 95/98/ME and Windows Vista do not have this problem.

Do you mean that with vista you can swap drive between differents computers and they will boot fine?

Yes, you can swap HDD with Vista on them and be fine. The Vista install simply copies a image from the DVD to the HDD, then install the appropriate drivers. The install is not dependent on the chipset like Windows XP is. This can be beneficial if you want to run Vista on a system with less than 512MB of RAM. You can simply install it on a computer that meets specs then put that hard drive into a different computer. After Vista install all of the drivers for that computer, you will have full functionality.

FWIW, I actually managed to get Vista to run on my 400mhz ThinkPad 600E with 288mb RAM by installing Vista on my ThinkPad A31 then moving the drive to the 600E.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:FWIW, I actually managed to get Vista to run on my 400mhz ThinkPad 600E... <snip>

Define "run" . Is it more like "walk"?

I'm curious because I have a couple of 600Es (and Xs) as well and I've not yet begun to investigate what Vista is all about (besides reading reviews in PC Mag).

Well the entire time I had it up and operational, Vista was in the process of searching for drivers (before I decided to stop) so I didn't get a full impression. To be honest though, while rather sluggish, it was still usuable. It was like running Windows 98 on my 133mhz ThinkPad 760ED in that it was usable but not topping the practicality list. I'd say the 600 series ThinkPads are best with Windows XP since that runs usably and is able to fully exploit the multimedia capabilities of the line.

Now I'm about to try Vista on my A21p now that I've migrated my important stuff to the ThinkPad A31 I own. Just note that you can't install Vista on any computer not meeting or exceeding Microsoft's stated requirements. You'll have to install a hard drive with Vista already operational on it.