As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives.
This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on.
- Get a USB drive > 4GB
- Use The Disk Managment pane in Computer Managment (Control Panel > Administrative tools)
- Find your drive and right-click > Format the partition as NTFS
- Once its formatted, right click it again and ‘Mark Partition as Active’
- Use a image mounter such as WinCDEmu to mount the Windows 7 image
- Drop into a cmd prompt and navigate to the drive where the Window7 image is mounted, cd to ‘boot’ and execute ‘bootsect /nt60 X:’ where X: is the drive letter the target partition is mounted on.
- Copy the contents of the mounted Windows 7 image to ‘X:’
- Reboot and if you dont know how to boot from a USB drive, you probably arn’t reading this, but if not…
I know there are alternative methods for doing this in Linux, but since i didnt use them in this instance, i cant comment on them.
FYI: Windows 7 is now my full time OS, and frankly im suprised; Theres a few things I miss, like a nice easy command line networking, SSH built in, a decent X11 server, but for a all round notes/documentation/lil-bit-o-code machine, the Tableting pros few out-weigh the cons. E.G The wonderous marvelous stupendous Math Input Panel that outputs in MathML!
13
Jul 09
Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS
I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.
From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.
About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.
That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.
Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.
My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.