Hi there,

I'm new to the forum but have been lurking for a while now.

I've bought a T30 from ebay a year or so ago and I love it but feel it may be time to upgrade it and give it a little care and attention.

I am currently in the process of upgrading the RAM to 1gb (PC2100), some people have suggested that the T30 can take 2gb of PC2700. Can anyone confirm this?

Also I am looking into upgrading the hard drive as well, currently I think there's a 40gb drive there. Does anybody have any suggestions of which drive to get I'm thinking 80gb or there abouts, preferrably 7200rpm if there is one.

Also and most importantly, the T30 did not come with any recovery discs. There also doesn't seem to be any recovery partition. Does anybody know where I may be able to get hold of the recovery disc for a T30???

Thanks in advance guys

Welcome to the Forum.
The T30 can take 2x 1GB RAM modules.
As long as it is ATA/PATA/EIDE/IDE (and NOT SATA), you can put in any 2.5" hard disk you can find.
The maximum HD size for ATA-etc. is 320GB. Because of the heat that the T30 itself creates, it would be better to go for a new(ish) 5400rpm HD. With today's construction, these are (almost) as fast as the older 7200rpm HDs.
See e.g. this: http://www.dabs.com/category/components ... 0-47250000
Those Western Digital HDs are highly recommended. Larger (than 80GB) HDs aren't that expensive either.
Other good brands include Hitachi, Fujitsu and Seagate.
Don't buy Maxtor or Toshiba HDs.

As to T30 recovery disks, check your PM.

http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?cat=414
If you are in no hurry to replace the drive
Check this page from time to time
I run Seagate's almost exclusively and have purchased both Factory Recertified and New units from Geeks.
By watching i have gotten some outstanding deals
New 20gig for $11.00
New 40gig for $34.00
New 80gig for $39.00

Watch this site for a preview of what Geeks is getting
http://www.evertek.com/orders/order_form_shipping.asp
1 to 5 days before Geeks has it, Evertek has it

Then there is always NewEgg
http://www.newegg.com/

Ron

Ron, look at the OP's location, it's UK, not US!

You really don't need recovery disks to install a new hard drive. You need to clone the drive onto the new drive. There is a lot on this forum about that. I just did that when I installed a new wd 5400 rpm drive on mine. I used acronis true image, which has a clone drive feature. I picked up an ultrabay pata hd caddy, put the new drive into the caddy, and cloned the drive with the software. Then (very importantly!) before booting up after the clone operation, remove the caddy and replace the old drive with the new one. It should boot up with the OS intact. Painless! I then used a gparted live cd to change the partitioning so as to have a larger OS partition than before as well as a second partition for file storage, backups, etc. There are other ways to do this, as I'm sure you'll discover if you search around the forum here. And, yes, 2gb is fine on the t30. I installed 2gb on mine and all is well.

It never hurts to start a fresh install from scratch.
The clone method is fine if you have absolutely no issues with your current Windows.
But if you (like most people) have been installing/uninstalling/testing/trying software for a while, you'll want to get rid of all the crud that was left behind by bad uninstall procedures. A must if you ever had Symantec/Norton on it!
Also, Windows is not exactly known for cleaning up after itself.

Oops
Sorry the heart was in it,
The eyes were not

Ron

Some time ago I was introduced to a free program "Revo Uninstaller". This will uninstall the program, and cleans up the registry and all the files associated with the program (why MS cannot build something like this in their OS?). So far, it has done a good job for me.

As i happen to own a t30, here are a few recommendations:
1. Upgrade processor to at least 2.0 ghz
2. Apply new thermal compound to processor and heatsink (make sure you clean out heat sink too!)
3. get the newest IDE 5400RPM drive
4. Do a fresh install of windows XP (do not attempt vista or 7. i have, terribly slow. XP is the only thing it can handle).
5. Boost ram to 2gb (2x1gb pc2100)

that should put together a fairly fast machine. But its bottleneck will always be its GPU

Good luck

T30 came with 2 GPU flavors, a cheapo 16MB and a better 32MB version. The 32MB still works fine for most (non-graphical) apps.

i beg to differ. t30 only came with the crap 16MB version of the Mobility 7500, not even a 32MB option. That was available in the R40 /T40. I can't even use youtube on this machine only for word processing.

My apologies, you are right. Got so many different TPs going through my hands, that I must have mixed them up.

Hi all,

I'm back and now equipped with 3 restore cds necessary to do a fresh install of winxp (I'll slipstream sp3 in later) and also 1GB of RAM.

The problem I am having though is that I can not seem to get the restore discs to work at all. I've set to boot to cd in the bios settings and inserted the restore cd but nothing happens. I've also tried the same procedure with an xp cd and got the same result. Could someone explain what I am doing wrong?

I can not seem to get my T30 to boot from anything other than the HDD. Do I need to try and boot from a USB stick?

Anyone got any ideas what exactly I need to be doing with the restore cds? I presumed they would work straight out of the box.

Thanks in advance

I found that on at least 2 of my T30's they seem to take an extra long time to boot. In fact I had given up on one of them, and walked away, came back an hour later and it was asking for disk #2. Never did figure out why that machine took so long.
My suggestion is to set it up correctly and walk away, go do something else, watch TV or what ever...a watched pot wont boil so to speak

Ron

Set the BIOS to start from CD first.
Then make sure you start with a new (or wiped) disk. Just deleting partitions won't cut it!
Use e.g. DBAN (on the web for free).

You should be able to boot from the first disc of the system recovery CD's.

Also, the system recovery CD's install the original version of Windows XP Pro. The Service Pack 3 update program requires Service Pack 1 or higher.

I have a 100 GB that I thought that I'd never max out -- until I started helping my GF create videos for the class that she teaches at the local college. An hour's worth of video (*.avi) requires 12GB of HD space.

Hi there,

I have decided to keep my old hard drive and I have wiped it using DBAN and Kill Disk. The problem is I can't get the recovery discs to do anything! After wiping the hard drive I have set the bios to boot from CD first but it keeps showing "Operating system not found". Can anybody tell me what I am doing wrong?

Are you using a cr-rom or a dvd-rom in the Ultra2000 bay?
Do you have something else to run in it?

Ron

I am using a CD-RW/DVD in the Ultrabay. Unfortunately I do not have anything else to try in that bay.

The error message I am getting is as follows:

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating System not found

I have tried reseating both the CD-RW/DVD drive and also the HDD many times but to no avail. Both of these devices were working earlier today before I decided to do a factory restore.

I am using

Embedded Controller: 1.07
BIOS version: 2.10

I do have a usb DVDRW drive that I could use but from what I have read so far the problem seems to be with the HDD. I can get a new HDD tomorrow to try but I would like to try and resolve this before that as the drive was working fine this morning.

Maybe you have a dead or almost dead CMOS battery. Your T30 doesn't seem to boot from the CD/DVD.
Upon start, press F12, then select to boot from CD. That should also work.

RBS thats where I was headed.
I have had both CD and DVD not wanting to boot without windblows loading drivers. After windblows starts, they work fine, until it starts forget about it.

Ron

Installing XP from a donor macine

1) Install the hard drive as a slave in a working desktop system. (If laptop HD will require an adapter) I used a USB enclosure

2) Right click "My Computer" click "Manage", goto "DisK Managment" and format the drive, NTSF Quick Format will do.

3) Insert your Windows XP CD in the drive, then exit the auto launch screen. Does not matter if it is XP or 2kPro, they both will work

4) Go to "My Computer" and look at the drive letters of the CD-rom containing the XP disk, and also the drive letter of the hard drive you are installing to. Most cases it will be D and E

5) Assuming the hard drive is "E" and the XP cd is in "D:", go to the DOS prompt and type (or cut and paste): Start>Run>CMD….I have only gotten this to work with a cut and paste, although I have tried typing it in at least 12 times

D:\I386\winnt32.exe /syspart:F: /tempdrive:F: /makelocalsource /noreboot

After you hit enter it may take up to 60 seconds to begin the copy

6) Setup will begin and ask you if you want to upgrade or full install. It will then ask you for a few more things including the CD key.

7) When it finishes doing what it needs to your HD it will close automatically and return you to the desktop. At this point it appears to be loading the OS onto the machine you are doing this on…..IT DOES NOT, just ignore it and let it restart the machine


Just take it back out of your desktop and slap that HD in whatever computer you want and it will finish installing XP correctly! Once it is installed back into the Laptop/Desktop it acts just like the start of the install on a new machine, the first portion of this procedure may take 15mins, the rest of this procedure (after the reinstall) takes just as long as a fresh install on a new machine….thats why I mentioned it would take about twice as long

Ron

Can anyone tell me if the new (or wiped) HDD needs to be formatted before the restore cd's will work? For some reason they just don't seem to be do anything no matter the state of the HDD I put in. Hard drive has been checked and all seems to OK, no loud clicking noises, it's just slow and in need of an update (Hitachi Travelstar DK23EA Series 20 GB - ATA-100 4200rpm)

I have disk 1 of the restore cds inserted but it just keeps saying Operating system not found.

I know that I can boot from the CD drive as I have IBM PC Tools booting from it. It reports no problems with my system at all and as I have said in a previous post, all was working before I decided to do a full restore.

Any suggestions gratefully received

I'm starting to think that the restore CDs don't work somehow....

OK now I have a new hard drive in. It's a Western Digital WD800BEVE 80GB 2.5" Hard Drive ATA100 5400rpm. This is recognised correctly in the BIOS.

T30 Restore CD number is in the drive. CD drive set to boot first. Removable Devices and IBA 4.1.07 Slot 0240 disabled in BIOS.

I still get the "Operating System not found" error message.

Does anybody think that the restore CDs I received were a bad copy or something?

I can't see what I am doing wrong, I can't believe that I've bricked my laptop all because I wanted to do a full restore!

Please HELP!

Just to let you all know that I am attempting this with R&R version 1.1 on a T30 Thinkpad 2367-86G. I've tried all three disks and none of them seem to work.

Would I need to be using a more recent version?

Go up a couple of posts:h

I have had both CD and DVD not wanting to boot without windblows loading drivers. After windblows starts, they work fine, until it starts forget about it.

Ron

I've tried using the suggestion to Install XP from a donor machine but run into problems with the CoA code. I've been trying to install from an eMachines PC but can't get past the bit where it asks for me the CoA code.

Any further ideas?

I know I'm bumping an old thread here but I really want to try and get this machine back up and running as there is nothing at all wrong with it.

Sorry for returning back to an old post but I have been able to load Windows 7 onto this machine! (Although it is far too slow to use practically) As far as I can see there is no problem at all with any of the parts.

Can anyone suggest reasons why I can use the Windows 7 install disc but not an XP?

If you use the correct restore CDs, you don't have to enter any COA or other keys!
The procedure wipes your hard disk, installs the recovery partition, reboots and then installs XP from the recovery partition, incl. all the IBM drivers and programs.
PM me if you require a set.

I have the recovery disks in iso format if int'l shipping is a concern. Just need to give me an address to upload them.