[ltp] New Thinkpad and First Steps

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 10:58:28AM -0500, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> I am expecting a shiny new Z61p any day now.  Of course, it comes with 
> Windows installed by default.  Past experience tells me that this time I 
> had better generate the disk backups (and verify them) BEFORE I wipe the 
> disk and install Fedora Rawhide --- I plead guilty to living on the 
> bleeding edge, with much blood already spilled and more to come ... it 
> hurts so good, :-)

What is your time worth?  You can get a new 100G, 7200RPM SATA drive
from Provantage for $118.43, and then if you really want be able to
potentially use it in another system as a primary drive, you can buy
the hard drive caddy for $29 (model TP-60, from
http://newmode.us/caddies/IBM.htm).  If you are just going to use it
in an Ultrabay SATA driver carrier, you don't really need the caddy; I
just substituted a piece of paper to prevent the circuit board from
shorting against the metal of the Ultrabay carrier.  And if you don't
have the carrier, you can buy one for around $45 or so.   

The new SATA drive works just fine in my T60, although it is missing
the IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD, which means it won't unload the head
as quickly when the hdaps software notices that your laptop has been
dropped.  But as a backup medium, that may not matter.  Just do a
disk-to-disk copy from your pre-installed hard drive to the newly
purchased SATA drive, and now if you ever need to boot the Windows
system to install some firmware upgrade or enable your EVDO card, you
can just insert the Ultrabay carrier, and then configure your grub
bootloader to boot the Windows partitions, and you're all done.  Total
cost of doing this way is under $200, and if you already have the
Ultrabay carrier and you don't care much about the hard drive
caddy/bracket, you could do it for around $120.

						- Ted