Thinkpads Forum

I have a T61p that I have been using for years that just died (completely). It was running Ubuntu 14.04 and had a 500GB SSD.
I have a W520 that I would like to move everything over to (I have a ton of installed applications and would rather not move everything over manually if I don't have to).
As a first attempt, can I just put the existing SSD drive in the new machine and try booting it? Both had 64 bit, SMP kernels and NVidia graphics chips.
I was just wondering what the chances of damaging anything are and what the odds of it booting.

Yes! In fact, I swapped my 128GB SSD from an intel gpu T61, to an Nvidia T61, and then to my current W530. I also swapped drives between my T23 and T43 without any problems.

With linux, swapping drives between even completely different machines usually works flawlessly. On leaner linux distros, you may need to install an additional video driver. Since you have Ubuntu, you already have many bundled drivers.

Swapping the SSD into the W520 should work fine.

I've had mixed experiences cloning Ubuntu 14.04. On my W520, I have the Bumblebee switchable graphics driver installed and I had to use an image from before I installed it that had the Intel graphics drivers in order to get it to work on my X220 Tablet. A T61 with Nvidia to a W520 sounds easier.

I did have to spend a couple of hours tweaking afterwards to to get everything working as well but it was still a lot less work than installing from scratch.

At one point I had a basic install of Ubuntu 14.04 on an Expresscard SSD and I didn't have any problem booting it on several different Thinkpads. Right now I have Mint 18 on it and it boots on everything I've got that has a 64 bit processor.