T60 recovery question

[at both ends]

In return for the job of moving data from old machines to new, I inherited a fleet (5 ) of 14" T60's from a local business that's upgrading its sales hardware. The machines are beat up, grimy, most need new batteries, so I'm not sure who got the deal here.

The hard drives are all 60GB, small for the business's use, so whoever set the machines up at the time wiped the R&R partition to get some extra space. All of them seem to have had recovery CD sets created and won't burn another set. Six years and two moves later, no surprise that no one knows where those sets are. I would really like to do a clean re-install to factory settings. Four of the junked machines have legible XP COA's. The fifth one is in tatters and no good.

I have a recovery set from another T60, same 4 digit prefix in the model number. I want to use that one recovery set to reset all four of the machines with legible COA's. When XP starts up for the first time, it's going to ask for the 25 digit serial off the COA, and I can do that for four of them. (I guess the last one is destined for Linux or I might hackintosh it for a challenge.)

Am I allowed to use one recovery set to refresh four different machines or am I creating a problem? With 4 good COA's, on the original hardware, I think this should be ok but I'm wondering if something will go wrong. I sure don't want to screw up what I know is a good recovery set that I've used a few times already for what has been a household workhorse.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

[Neil]

Yes, you can use one recovery set on all the machines. If you are actually using IBM ThinkPad recovery media, you will not be asked to enter any product keys.

A ThinkPad must have an intact recovery partition in order to burn a single set of disks. You can actually burn multiple sets, but you must recover the machine to factory state each time you make another disk set.

[dr_st]

When XP starts up for the first time, it's going to ask for the 25 digit serial off the COA

It won't.

[emtee3511]

It looks like TuuS still has available Windows XP Pro Disk/COA, which you could use to replace your lost COA sticker:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... +delivered