Service Forum

[IsItSafe]

Complete newbie here, sorry for stupid question, if it is...

I have a t40, its working fine, hardware wise, however I need to re-install xp, and would like to put a bigger hard drive in while I'm at it. I got the 5CD ibm recovery set, i got a ibm hard drive, and i've got the heeby jeebies about going any further cos...

when i hit f1 (with current working, but limping, XP installation) the lock symbol comes up, i hit return, i get to bios ok, i go to security, and it says:

harddrive password disabled,
power on password disabled
and yes, you guessed it, supervisir password enabled and greyed out. ( I think that's what it said, I'm scared to even hit f1 again to confirm)

What's gonna happen if I take the old hard`drive out, put a new one in, and power up with the recovery cd in? Am I gonna be asked for the SVP, which i don't know, it being a second hand machine about 4 years ago, no chance of contacting original owner even if he did know the pw.

Will I be locked out? Will I even able to put the old hard drive back and get it working again ? Can I take the hard drive out to ghost all the work and application installs I've done over the years, before I do a clean xp re-install? Will just taking the hard drive out , trigger this damn security system and lock me out just because I've taken it out of the machine and not know the svp?

I'm confused because one of the other posts (Bob: " At F1 you should get the SVP prompt. But if you don't, simply remove the drive and try again.") makes it sound like the lock symbol, which is what I get whe I hit F1, I think, IS the svp request. Could that mean a blank svp? The other thing that post suggests to me is that just taking the drive out triggers the svp, which I really don't want to do.

Please help me: what is safe? I just wanna do a new windows install, and preferably on a new hard drive, this password stuff that I might trigger is so scary.

Thank you so much, whoever.

[victor]

Hi,

[IsItSafe]

As we'd say in Oz: 'Onya ( short for Good on you ).
"you may simply ghost the actual drive to the new one, but increase the base partitions sizes."....that's exactly what I want to do.
In my fevered panic that I wouldn't be able to remove the drive from the machine to do it, I'd been trying to think how to ghost the existing drive with everything intact while it was still in the machine, but not booted into windows.
I was thinking: boot from a win98 usb floppy into dos, have the dos ghost program on a usb stick, run it from there to ghost the c drive while in the machine onto a second notebook drive attached via a usb interface. Plausible? Just booting directly to a usb stick with ghost on it would be ace. Can that be done with TP's, I have a ibm usb floppy drive which i assume i can boot to, so the "boot to usb" part in bios is plausible.
On my wife's Mac, I was able to "clone" its drive onto an external drive (via firewire for that generation mac) and can boot to that firewire conected drive on other macs, so it's like taking your system with you in your pocket, brilliant. (That's cos it's really unix no doubt, can you imagine being able to do that with windows?)
Imagining that with DOS/windows: Can I just boot to c:/ command prompt , run ghost in DOS, ghost to an external usb hardrive, and will that resulting external ghosted windows install be bootable on the same machine?
I know this isn't a windows rescue help forum for the completely technically challenged, so I'll completely understand not being replied to, but I have often found, good brains go with good will, so it's worth a punt.
Thnx all, esp Victor.

[victor]

Norton Ghost doesn't support USB drives, as far as I am aware. You may use and Ultrabay adapter.
Using the ghost program from DOS is better in this case, because under Windows it wont make the system partition active on the new drive and you should run diskpart to do that manually.

You may boot from a DOS USB stick or USB floppy and launch ghost from there. - so you'll have the 2 drives set on native IDE ports and ready to go.
_________________
Victor Voinea
ALLservice HQ, Romania.