T40 to T43 Hard Drive Swap - What drivers are needed?

[underclocker]

FYI-

I'd like to swap hard drives from a T40 to a T43. I'd prefer to upgrade in a painless manner, meaning not installing every app and moving data.

I tried to just swap the drives, but received a typical hard drive controller not the same blue screen and system halt on boot up. (Yes, I did use a spare, ghosted disk for my trial run.)

Has anyone done the swap? What drivers are needed? I'm assuming the Intel chipset drivers, but would like to be sure.

[Ken Fox]

FYI-

I'd like to swap hard drives from a T40 to a T43. I'd prefer to upgrade in a painless manner, meaning not installing every app and moving data.

I tried to just swap the drives, but received a typical hard drive controller not the same blue screen and system halt on boot up. (Yes, I did use a spare, ghosted disk for my trial run.)

Has anyone done the swap? What drivers are needed? I'm assuming the Intel chipset drivers, but would like to be sure.

Unless you have DAYS to waste on this project you will not succeed and you should not try it. After wasting (and I do mean WASTING) a day and a half trying to migrate a T42 Hard disk to my new T43, I threw in the towel. And yes, I tried every imaginable combination of driver loading, I deleted chipset drivers and put in the new ones, etc. etc. etc. If there was anything resembling an easy solution I would have tried it 8 times by the time I gave up.

I might add I have a fair amount of experience doing this sort of thing and have done it successfully a number of times. Unfortunately, the hardware in the T43 is so different from earlier T4xs that the likelihood of success is small. I don't give up easily but I gave up after a day and a half was wasted.

[christopher_wolf]

You get a lot of niggling problems in such a HDD swap in the beginning. From a T41 to, say, a T42 would be slightly easier because you wouldn't have to deal with the hardware differences that a T43 presents. The biggest ones that you would have to deal with include the SATA power management driver, on almost all T43s since they have a SATA controller with a SATA-PATA bridge talking to a PATA HDD, and the one ExpressCard slot. I have seen related HDC errors, like the one you got, when drives were mismatched with different vendor mobos that, again, had different hard drive controllers than Windows tried to load the drivers for.

So it might very well be more efficient to simply re-install the apps and move the data over onto the T43 after you set it up. It isn't impossible to do it the way you suggested, but it is more difficult than a standard swap in most cases.

[pianowizard]

So it might very well be more efficient to simply re-install the apps and move the data over onto the T43 after you set it up.

Many people like to reinstall Windows and all applications once or twice a year anyway. I am one of these people, and I simplify the process a little bit by storing all programs and drivers on one external hard drive and reinstalling all programs and drivers from that hard drive, so that I don't have to change CDs 15 times or download all drivers from scratch. I also have a text file with all the product keys listed, so I just copy-and-paste them during the installation process.

[underclocker]

Thanks for the replies. I'm not ready to give up yet.

We use UIU (Universal Imaging Utility) at the office for our Dell machines. It looks like it will work on IBM's.

I'll try this weekend and report back. (Free trial, too.)

http://www.binaryresearch.net/products/ ... ng_utility

[underclocker]

Ouch. That was a waste of time. I got everything to come up and work well using UIU. I thought I was done. However, the TPM driver would lock up the T43 everytime I tried to install the driver - since the new hardware wizard detected it at every boot up.

I could have disabled the TPM and lived with it, but I'd prefer a clean install.

I did some research and found out that the HAL is different for a T43. Starting with T43's, the ACPI Uniprocessor HAL is required.

I found a way to upgrade the HAL, but this still didn't work, as it needs to be correct from the beginning. After the HAL and TPM driver upgrade, I was back to locking up on every boot up.

Anyway, like others reported, it's not worth the time and trouble.

I'll wait a while and try a Vista install.