An X30 Surprise

[schen]

I accidentally came across and interesting phenomina last night. I put a random Hitachi 80Gb/5400rpm that was laying around into the machine with the intention of doing a "clean" XP load on it. So I was a little surprised to find that the machine booted right up and loaded the desktop!

As I dug around a little bit and realized that it was the HDD that came out of an A31p! That's a machine that virtually weighed twice that of the X31, had a different chipset and the ATI FireGL GPU vs. Intel integrated GPU. However it ran stable enough until I could replace the old drivers with the correct ones from Lenovo.

Now it's running fine, so I thought I've relate this kind of interesting little story.

[dr_st]

Nice!

Really the only thing that matters for XP to actually boot are the storage controller drivers. And since both machines have the same southbridge (ICH3-M) and the same disk controller integrated in it, the drivers naturally matched.

However, in some cases, even if the chipset is different, but the hardware interface is close enough for the drivers to be compatible, you can still get the machine to boot.

[sjthinkpader]

Or boot using safe mode, shutdown, then reboot. The only thing that needs to be removed is TPM, then in most cases will update to new HAL correctly.

[jronald]

It wont work with and A22m and 2kPro, I tried it last night. So I blew it away and installed xubuntu. Im using it now.

Ron