Restoring an Intel GPU win 7 image onto an nvidia system

[cadillacmike68]

What issues am I likely to encounter when restoring an image from an Intel W7 T61 system onto an nvidia based T61?

I've done restores from a base image to systems with different hardware / options like FP readers, express cards, smart card readers, etc. and it has always found the drivers, but they were all Intel graphic to Intel graphics. I think I found a safe nvidia with WSXGA+ and T8300 and would need to get it "standardized" to my preferred configuration.

Will it BSOD me right away or will it kick down to VGA mode? Can I boot it in safe mode and then let it find the drivers on lenovo's site? Or is there a driver set I can DL and save onto a USB drive.

[RealBlackStuff]

Should work.
Just get nVidia drivers after it's up and running.
I have test-drives with W7 that include various once-upon-a-time-installed Intel, ATI and nVidia drivers.
Depending on which machine that HD goes in, it usually finds the right video driver after the next boot.

[MisterB]

It usually loads a basic VGA driver if it doesn't find the Nvidia GPU. I've never had a blue screen due to a video driver when cloning a system from one Thinkpad to another. The main cause of blue screens have been AHCI drivers when cloning from a earlier generation Thinkpad to a later one. The 420, 520s use a different driver than the 410, 510s and earlier. Cloning a system with the older driver on a newer Thinkpad will result in a blue screen right after Windows starts loading. No problem cloning from a newer Thinkpad to an older one.

[Pete B]

I've done this several times and as I recall, if you are hooked up to the
internet it will find an NVIDIA driver from Windows update at boot time.
It is not the most recent so you should get the best one from the NVIDIA
site. You might have to reboot a few times so that the correct Northbridge
driver also installs but it all works without any blue screens.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

It usually loads a basic VGA driver if it doesn't find the Nvidia GPU. I've never had a blue screen due to a video driver when cloning a system from one Thinkpad to another. The main cause of blue screens have been AHCI drivers when cloning from a earlier generation Thinkpad to a later one. The 420, 520s use a different driver than the 410, 510s and earlier. Cloning a system with the older driver on a newer Thinkpad will result in a blue screen right after Windows starts loading. No problem cloning from a newer Thinkpad to an older one.

Does it seem to you like there's any long term negative effects of migrating an OS installation between boards like this as long as it initially seems stable?

I recently bought a T61 sans hard drive, so I stuck an old HDD with a Win7 installation from my Z61t (which is basically a T60) into it and it found and updated everything after a couple reboots. I'm now thinking of reselling selling the T61 and would rather just sell it as is than have to reinstall the OS and all the Thinkpad drivers/software, but I don't want to set my buyer up with an OS that's going to have problems.

[cadillacmike68]

^^^
We will soon find out because I'm restoring an Intel graphics image onto an nvidia system at present. It also has a strange computrace message when I go into the BIOS. It says "equipped with computrace" but not "activated", And further, there are NO computrace options ANYWHERE in the BIOS?!?!? This one might require an EEPROM reset to completely clear that annoyance.

Plus its an old nvidia ticking time bomb GPU, so who knows what will happen.

I don't care; I have a brand new IBM mobo for it, but want to see what happens next with this one! Maybe it will work forever, maybe it will toast itself next week. Mfr date is early Feb 2008, so there is a chance (slime to none) that it has a good GPU already, but I'm not holding my breath.

It does have the nice SXGA+ screen though and a 2.4GHz CPU...

Pete what do you mean about the northbridge chip? Were they different in intel vs nvidia mobos?? Either winblows update or lenovo system update should catch anything out of whack, once I get the internet active.

Of course then I might have deal with computrace or reformat the drive later and start over... Maybe I should have started on a system without computrace. Whatever, I have spare HDDs - should have used a 5400RPM for this one though.

[cadillacmike68]

Success, It restored and booted to an 800x600 resolution. Man that's tough to navigate when the restore image was set up for larger type and large icons!

Of course this is when my main T61 decided to give me the server accessing support.lenovo.com for the nvidia drivers, but I was able to use internet extorter to DL it. Need to get the ones for the T61p as well.

And, of course computace made its little rcpnet files in sys32 and 64. One more annoyance.

[MisterB]

Does it seem to you like there's any long term negative effects of migrating an OS installation between boards like this as long as it initially seems stable?

I recently bought a T61 sans hard drive, so I stuck an old HDD with a Win7 installation from my Z61t (which is basically a T60) into it and it found and updated everything after a couple reboots. I'm now thinking of reselling selling the T61 and would rather just sell it as is than have to reinstall the OS and all the Thinkpad drivers/software, but I don't want to set my buyer up with an OS that's going to have problems.

It's generally best to do a clean install when selling a system. Cloning works as long as the system is clean but there is always a lot of customization that the buyer might not want, software to uninstall and personal information that is not always in obvious places.

You can try creating a new administrator account, deleting all the old accounts and uninstalling all the software that didn't come with the system. That will clean a lot out but there still might be a thing or two in registry keys or configuration files that you would want removed.

[Pete B]

The Northbridge is the Intel chip with the integrated GPU. I know that when I've
done this that quite a few drivers load, but never bothered to note which ones.

I had Computrace enabled on a Dell that I bought used, the process showed
up when I ran Rkill before malware scans. It is like LOJACK for a computer and
once it is enabled in BIOS you cannot disable it even with a reflash. It took some
work to disable it and I can roughly tell you what I did if you're interested.
Basically, you replace the .dll s with empty text files and remove system privileges
from them otherwise they will be recreated from the BIOS.