Temporary swap of HD from T42p to T41 — Can do?

[bvaughn]

After reading a few threads that touch on the question, I think this can be done, but as I'm no hardware expert, I'd appreciate having it confirmed.

My T42p will be gone for a little while to have its backlight replaced — anyone curious can see threads describing the problem and the solution I'm using — and I'll hold on to the hard drive in the meantime. I'd like to press my wife's T41 into temporary service while my T42p is absent. I'm thinking that I should be able to swap my T42p hard drive into her T41, and thus I could use her T41 (as though it were my T42p, more or less) during the day when she's gone; then I could put her hard drive back into the T41, for her to use at night.

The T42p drive is a Fujitsu MHT2080AH; the BIOS is ver. 3.19 (1RETDNWW); the OS is Windows XP Pro SP3.
The T41 drive is a Hitachi HTS726060M9AT00; the BIOS is ver. 3.21 (1RETDPWW); the OS is Windows XP Pro SP2.

Can anyone with expertise confirm that the swap will work OK? Thanks for your help.

[SteveS]

The swap will probably work, as both the T41 and T42 are built on more or less the same hardware platform, and both drives are compatible.

Some cautions – if the video GPU or wireless radio are different models, Windows will detect this and reinstall the correct driver. When you go back, the process will be repeated. Anytime you do this, there are “fragments” remaining in the registry from supporting the old hardware that do not get deleted. There is always a risk of some compatibility error showing up down the road from having conflicting registry entries.

I would recommend disabling the Auto Update feature for Windows or Microsoft Update, if enabled, and do not attempt to run Microsoft Update for either Windows or Office while the foreign drive is in the PC. To protect against pirated software, Microsoft now uses a utility which validates the installation of Windows and Office whenever an update is requested. When you swap drives, the system board ID, and CPU serial number will not match what was registered in Windows during the original install, which will appear as a pirated copy to Microsoft. Once this happens, you won’t be able to run update, even after returning the drive to the original machine, without a lot of pleading to a customer support person.

The safest way to go is to use an Ultrabay Slim HDD adapter with your drive. This will make it appear as a “D” drive in Windows, and all of your data files will be available. But the Windows operating files will not be used. You won’t have access to any installed programs from your old machine however.

[bvaughn]

Thanks for your reply.

Some cautions – if the video GPU or wireless radio are different models, Windows will detect this and reinstall the correct driver. When you go back, the process will be repeated. Anytime you do this, there are “fragments” remaining in the registry from supporting the old hardware that do not get deleted. There is always a risk of some compatibility error showing up down the road from having conflicting registry entries.

This could happen in my case, since the video GPU and wireless radio models in the two ThinkPads are different. I have a couple of registry-cleaning utilities; perhaps I can hope that between them, they will detect and clean-up the "fragments" in the T41 registry.

Would I notice that Windows is installing new drivers, when I start the T41 after putting the T42p hard drive in it?

I would recommend disabling the Auto Update feature for Windows or Microsoft Update, if enabled, and do not attempt to run Microsoft Update for either Windows or Office while the foreign drive is in the PC.

This won't be a problem. I never allow Windows or Microsoft to do anything unbidden, if I can avoid it; and I seldom do manual updating. When it comes to dealing with Microsoft and Windows, my attitude is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The safest way to go is to use an Ultrabay Slim HDD adapter with your drive. This will make it appear as a “D” drive in Windows, and all of your data files will be available. But the Windows operating files will not be used. You won’t have access to any installed programs from your old machine however.

Aye, there's the rub. I already have my data files on a removable drive, which I could simply connect to the T41. But in fact, I would need to use a lot of the programs that are installed on my T42p, and that's why I came up with the idea of swapping the hard drives.