X201 HDD died... advice needed

The hard drive of my GF's X201 died suddenly and not even R&R will work. Drive is also unreadable in external enclosure (cannot even initialize it). Since we had no optical drive for the X201 (have since bought ultrabase) we never burned recovery discs (all data is back up though) so I'm trying to figure out how best to proceed.

I have another HDD I can use, but what's the best way to get Windows on to it? Maybe download Windows 7 onto a USB key? Or does the X201 bios recognize the optical drive in the ultrabase?

 

The bootable USB method is your best bet, simply download the ISO that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you had on the system, then you can use the Windows USB DVD Tool to create your own bootable USB drive installer with the ISO you downloaded. Also make sure you download and store the Graphics, Intel RST and Wireless/Ethernet drivers on to the USB stick as a bare minimum.

For reference you can also use my clean install guide since the principles are similar to what you need to do.

 

Thanks... do you happen to know the minimum USB capacity needed? Will an 8GB stick be enough?

The good news in all this for my GF is that she'll go from a 160GB 5400 drive to a 500GB 7200 drive!

 

4GB is normally the minimum but 8GB is plenty. You shouldn't have any problems but make sure it doesn't contain any files that you need as the USB tool may format the whole pen drive so back it up before using it just in case.