Installing Vista on a New HD

[absolut 0]

Hello,

I am going to install Vista Ultimate on my T60p in about a month and I was thinking about doing a clean install on a brand new hard drive. I have never replaced any notebook parts before so I had a few questions regarding the process.

1. I have heard many good things about the Hitachi 7k100. On the Hitachi website, there is also an E7k100. Is this a better hard drive? Which one should I get?

2. Will the new HD affect my battery/performance? Does the 7k100 consume more power than the IBM factory HD or will it see a decrease in performance?

3. How do I go about installing? Do I just install the HD and boot from the Vista CD? I’ve never messed around with the BIOS before and I’d like to avoid that if possible.

4. If I installed Vista on a new hard drive and I wanted to go back to XP, could I just slap in my old hard drive and boot? Would everything run as things run now?

5. Do you think this is a worthwhile endeavor? Or should I just clean install on my current IBM HD? Is there anything more I should know before doing this?

Thanks in advanced for the help!

[agarza]

1. Get the 7K100, not the E7K100, because it is intended to use in blade servers (the drive virtually can not be set in suspend mode) I own both drives, I first bought the E7K100 (60GB model) thinking it wouldn't matter, but inside my T42p it produced a lot of heat and lots of vibration and noise. I later bought a 7K100 and it's really noticeable the change, the drive doesn't vibrate and the palmrest gets barely hot. Get a 7K100 if you can.

2. It's minimum the decrease in battery life. I use the 7K100 and the stock 5K60 drive in the Ultrabay, and running the laptop with the battery I still get about 4-5hours depending on the usage. Wattage on the 7K100 compared to slower drives is about 0.2-0.3V more.

3. Yes, you should be careful to choose the right interface disk (7K100 are available in SATA or PATA), you should get the SATA disk, replace the original drive (following the HMM on Lenovo's site) and insert the new disk. No complications, then proceed to insert the Vista CD and there you go.

4. Yes, indeed.

5. This depends: Will you be using the laptop for what tasks, is it necessary for you to have a faster drive. Certainly installing Vista on a 7200rpm drive is a good thing, but bare in mind that not all the software/device drivers would work in Vista as they used to be supported with XP. As time passes by, Vista will not make you suffer hassles installing software.

If you can wait a bit longer, wait for the 7K200 of Hitachi, the newest drive integrating a NAND memory (flash type memory) which supposedly would take care of loading Vista much more faster than the current HDD does, plus it will be more energy-effective. You could then get Vista Ultimate and stay updated.

[absolut 0]

Benottomex,

Thank you for the quick and extremely thorough reply. You answered all my questions but upon more research, I stumbled upon one more.

Do I need to worry about the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver and boot in compatibility mode, install, and then boot in AHCI mode? I don't know what any of those terms mean or how to do that, but there seems to be a good Lenovo help page on the topic. The page only references to XP though. Do I need to go through the same process for Vista?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62909

Also, when you say to refer to the Lenovo HMM, I'm not sure what HMM means, but I'm just assuming it's their step by step instructions on removing the HDD.

I will not purchase Vista Ultimate until late April/May when my school offers it at a discounted price. Hopefully by then, Hitachi will have released their 7k200 with flash memory. Thanks again for all of your help!

[absolut 0]

Also, if I installed the stock Lenovo HD into an Ultrabay Slim adapter, would I be able to boot from the Ultrabay Slim HD so I could have dual boot XP/Vista on my T60p?

[GomJabbar]

Do I need to worry about the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver and boot in compatibility mode, install, and then boot in AHCI mode?

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=37940

[steveg47]

Here is a link to Lenovo's movie on how to remove the hard drive. This page also contains a link to the movie on how to install the hard drive:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 63909.html