Tracking down W701 recovery media

[fastbiter]

Hello everyone,
While helping clean out my parents' house in preparation for a move, my father and I came across his old W701. He's a recently retired civil engineer and got quite a bit of mileage out of this machine in the field. He wants to look at some of his old projects and work, but the HDD seems to be on its way out. We have been able to pull most of his data off, however windows throws lots of errors and is failing left and right. Thankfully he still has the install media for AutoCAD, etc.

Anyway! Putting in a new HDD and reinstalling windows is a trivial task. We haven't found (yet) the restore CDs he burned a decade ago and the HDD has failed to the point that I'm not able to run the restore process from that partition anymore. I've suggested reinstalling vanilla windows and then adding the drivers, but he's adamant about retaining the "factory fresh" install - which is reasonable, I suppose.

Problem is I haven't been able to track down disc images - either for download or buy. I've downloaded other thinkpad model recovery media from archive.org before, but I haven't found the W701 media there yet. Does anyone here have a pointer to the W701 restore media to download, or would they be willing to provide their own?

Thanks in advance!

[RealBlackStuff]

Closest would probably be W700ds, Windows XP Pro ("Create recovery media" ISOs) here:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=128170

[fastbiter]

Thanks for the heads up, I reached out. I'm not sure if W700 restore media will work, and we don't really want XP, but we could probably install XP then upgrade to 7.

[theterminator93]

Responded to your PM.

For the benefit of those reading, in the absence of the correct W701 restores, I recommend trying the set for the 1st gen i Series CPUs (e.g. T410/T510) on the W701. They are very similar from a hardware architecture standpoint (both 1st gen i series) - moreso than the W700 (1066 FSB Core 2). There will be missing drivers using either restore set, but there should be substantially fewer to manually hunt down and install using the T410 restore than W700 restore. Not to mention, the Lenovo customizations and applications will be period-correct for the W701 when using the T410 restore.