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    Help ASAP!

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by nolde05, Jul 25, 2008.

  1. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    You guys have been great! My T61 has arrived today but i am in a dilemma. I know this is not the most appropriate place to post this but i need an answer soon; i am excited for this laptop!

    I ordered a separate hard drive to upgrade into my t61. The only problem is...lenovo did not send me the cd with windows vista so i do not know how to get vista on my new hard drive!...please help.
     
    nolde05, Jul 25, 2008
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  2. ejl

    ejl fudge

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    well, usually, they put the os on a recovery partition that you can burn onto a dvd. also, you can clone your hard drive with software from acronis (free trial) but you need an external enclosure for that.
     
    ejl, Jul 25, 2008
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  3. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    so i can burn my OS onto a dvd from my laptop and then change the hard drives and install the OS onto new hard drive with dvd????
     
    nolde05, Jul 25, 2008
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  4. The Fire Snake

    The Fire Snake Notebook Virtuoso

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    Lenovo won't normally send you the Vista disks. You have to make your own by using the Rescue and Recovery program, under the Thinkvantage Utilities. There is a ~6 to 8 GB recovery partition on your harddrive. When you make the recovery disks, it burns the contents of this recovery partition onto the discs. Note that once you make one set of recovery disk, thats it, you cannot make another. Once you do this you can put in your new drive. Once the new drive is installed, put in your recovery CDs and boot off of them. They should install Vista for you on this new drive and create the recovery partition on this new drive. Let us know how it goes. I am sure this thread would get a lot more hits on the Lenovo forum.
     
    The Fire Snake, Jul 25, 2008
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  5. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    is this called a backup under thinkvantage?
     
    nolde05, Jul 25, 2008
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  6. The Fire Snake

    The Fire Snake Notebook Virtuoso

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    No, there should be an option called create rescue and recovery discs. I am trying to remember under what submenu it is located...Hmmmm. Press the blue thinkvantage button, does a black menu show up? If so, look for the option I mentioned. When I get to my machine I can tell you exactly tonight, but its hard to pull from my memory....
     
    The Fire Snake, Jul 25, 2008
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  7. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I think i got it...but let me know exactly later so i can be sure.
     
    nolde05, Jul 25, 2008
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  8. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hiii...

    The recovery disks i created never worked. So i ordered recovery disks from Lenovo. They both came up with an error when inserting 2nd disk..."No Service Partition"....help please.
     
    nolde05, Jul 30, 2008
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  9. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    did you format the harddrive before installing it into your laptop?
    If not, you can try formatting with fdisk, just run a command prompt, and you can do it through basic dos.
    When you install the vista cd, you should be prompted to format the harddrive.
    If the harddrive is not recognized, you need to go back to step 1 and see what's wrong.
    Does the Bios recognize the new harddrive?
    You need to set the bios boot order to boot from cd first, and then boot to harddrive.

    I hope this helps, but you should have been able to burn a disc right from the harddrive. You need to make a bootable disc, in order for it to work, so if you burned a normal disc, its not going to work.

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Jul 30, 2008
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  10. nolde05

    nolde05 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I did not format my hard drive...i simply replaced it with the old one put in the recovery disks. here is what my bios says...



    Bios- Boot agent v1.2.45 97-2007

    USB FDD- not detected
    DVD- no valid OS
    USB CD- not detected
    ATA HDDO- no valid OS
    PCI LAN- no valid OS
    USB HDD0- not detected
    ATA HDD1- not detected
     
    nolde05, Jul 30, 2008
    #10