Using another computer for making recovery disks or imaging a new X200s?

Hi there,
As of writing this, my X200s have arrived to my country and is less than 40km away from me, sitting at a UPS-hub, waiting to be delivered to me (which I think will be tomorrow).

Now, the X200s doesn't have a DVD-drive (duh!), but I do have a 4GB USB thumbdrive (figure it could be of some use) and a Fujitsu Lifebook (running XP) with an inbuilt DVD-drive and an ethernet patch-cable.

Are there any way I can either clone the entire X200s-drive before I do anything to it, and/or any way to make the recovery disks via the Lifebook?
I am stupified by this, as this will be the first time I ever do something like this, as I'm switching from Macs.
I guess I could call Lenovo and ask for some recovery disks, but I'd rather not.

Thanks in advance,

Snickety

 

LOL, I think I may have phrased it weird or something (30 views, and not even a "Nope, you have to get hold of a stand-alone dvd-drive or call lenovo").

Anyway, the idea is that I have no external DVD (yet, I will eventually), but access to another 'puter with DVD burner, a thumb-drive (4gig), an external USB-HDD and an ethernet patch-cable.
With these things in hand, will it be possible to either clone the X200s-drive to the external HDD, make recovery disks via the lifebook burner, and/or make a recovery "disk" on the thumb drive?

I hope that makes a little more sense.

P.S. I need to have this explained as "You format the thumb drive as xx etc" or "you will need to plug in the cable before you go into XX and click XX". I'm an idjit, I know ...

 

I think you could set your new computer up to share the dvd drive with your other computer and make recovery discs.

 

Thanks, Catmom

Any idea how I would go about that? The new one is running Vista Business and the Lifebook with the dvd is running XP.

 

Can you borrow a burner, just to make the discs?

 

Well I asked around, and everyone have no stand-alone – they're all built-in. I guess I could rip out the HDD, install it in a USB case and use some cloning app to do this?

 

Basically you rightclick on dvd unit in explorer, choose properties and go to share tab. You may also have to change some xp network settings before the dvd unit appears under the network heading in explorer on the vista machine. Once it does you rightclick on it, choose connect network unit and assign a unit letter. Your programs can then access the dvd unit with that letter as path. At some point Vista will also discover the new unit and install the driver for it.

Whether it will actually work is a different question, I have a feeling the recovery disk program might not recognise the dvds as properly burnt. But it's simple enough to try.

Don't forget to remove the share and restore network security settings on the xp machine once you finish.