T43 new hard drive-how long to use Product recovery cd's?

[momstoy2]

Hello Thinkpadders-I am a new T43 user, long time reader.Recently bought a T43 2686-DHU from the original owner, 60 GB Fujitsu hard drive (with 2010 error) which he had done a fresh install of XP-pro on. No recovery materials, no pre-loaded software at all. Everything works fine. Replaced 512 Ram with 1GB on the bottom of the machine, have not pulled the keyboard yet to put in the other 1GB stick-thanks to all you forum users for tips about watching the sale prices at Frye's! I tracked down a new Fujitsu 120GB hard drive (MHV2120AH) after reading a lot here, and secured my 8 Product Recovery CD's recently-1 is Rescue & Recovery,6 are numbered as product recovery, and the last labelled supplemental product recovery. Searched & read a lot here & elsewhere but not able to find out-(1) how much time to budget if I want to do a clean factory install on a brand new hard drive? (2-3 hours? or 4-6)? and (2)Do I need to do anything to the new hard drive before beginning with the R&R cd that will prep it? References I found only talked about cleaning off used hard drives prior to restore. I have boot sequence set to use Atapi CD first. thanks for your feedback!

[richk]

I always completely wipe the disks before installing. It will take you a 2 - 3 hours to install, but the process to install service packs, driver updates, etc. takes longer.

[Johan]

(2) Do I need to do anything to the new hard drive before beginning with the R&R cd that will prep it? References I found only talked about cleaning off used hard drives prior to restore. I have boot sequence set to use Atapi CD first.

First: Welcome to the Forum, Leslie!

With respect to your second question, I suggest you see the thread WD2500BEVE does not boot in a T42-Help - Succesfully Done !! and especially this post (and the reply a bit down pointing to How do I setup a hard disk drive in Windows 2000 and XP?). In short, your new HDD has to be initalized, have a partition made, and finally formatted. Once all this is done, you're ready to install everything from your CD's.

When you get your new T43 up and running, you might want to see the "PS" in this post or alternatively the very useful guide by forum-member visionviper: GUIDE: How to max out your battery life pointed to from the thread T43p excessively hot. Finally, the thread Thinkpad for my parents! (see from this post and on) discuss what programs to install, if you need any advice about that.

Congratulations and good luck with your new T43/HDD!

Johan

[momstoy2]

RichK-thanks so much for the time frame reference-It's about what I guessed, and of course doing updates can take all night or all day, but I can batch those between other projects.

Johan-thanks so much for your pointers. I had read about initializing the new hard drive back when I put a spare 20GB drive in the second bay and used it to make a back-up of the original drive several weeks ago, but I had totally forgotten about doing it-my bad! I really appreciate everyone's input on this forum, and thanks for the reference to the NHC program-I had not come across that great explanation of how to use it.