ditto_n

Thanks so much to both of you. I'm thinking if I can find the money I'll just get an external enclosure for my IDE drive. It seems like it will be the most painless route.

Hey everyone. I have purchased and currently waiting on a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 laptop to be shipped to me. It comes with vista, but I am planning on installing XP on it. I'm thinking that maybe there is a way to put the contents of the XP disc on a separate partition over network or maybe take out the hard drive and use my desktop to do it. I could then start the installation with a bootable USB thumbdrive or something? Are there any guides on how to do this? Maybe I could simply stick the hard drive into my desktop and do the whole install on it, install all the lenovo drivers and stick it back in the laptop? Would anything like this work? Edit: Forgot to clarify, there is no optical drive on the X61, which is why simply installing normally is out of the question. I'm really wondering about my second idea now, if there is a way to do that and still have windows recognize the laptop's hardware, it will probably be my best bet. But I'm afraid that it might not work because windows will first chose all the drivers for the hardware of my desktop.

You rock, thanks.

How would I go about having %programfiles% point to d:\Program Files instead of C:\Program Files if windows is installed on C:?

The best codec pack in the world and no one has a silent install for it. It uses the nulsoft installer and I have no clue how to do it silently, heres the site for those who want to get it. http://hellninjacommando.com/defilerpak/ Its much better then unattended Pack, if you ask me. So.. anyone know how to install sliently?