Upgrading to SSD with X60 - Rescue and Recovery lessons learnt

[chuckles67]

Successfully installed an Intel 80GB SSD, replacing the original 80GB slow Toshiba HDD, and the X60 is working better than ever - much faster boot time and application loading is now so much quicker

Sharing my experience

1. used Google Shopping to find best price on the SSD (180usd and free shipping)

2. using USB DVD/CD rewritable drive I made Rescue and Recovery disks from my X60

- by accident the first disk was a DVD

- then I learnt it should be a CD in order to be bootable, so I made a CD disk and kept the DVD just in case (read later)

- all other five disks were CDs

3. backed up the HDD and replaced it with the SSD which fits perfectly.  And the fun starts...

4. I try booting with the Rescue and Recovery CD disk using the USB disk drive; but the CD was not recognized

  #1 trick is to press blue Access IBM button during initial boot, and go into F1 bios menu, then after a short while ESC out, and the bootup proceeded with the USB optical drive

5.  Rescue and Recovery process started, however my new SSD drive was not recognized.  Heartstopper....

  #2 trick was a settings change in F1 bios options menu to set the SATA disk mode to Compatibility instead of AHCI

6.  Rescue and Recovery process starts again, and now SSD drive is recognized and I go for a full factory reset (nothing from the backup).  I sit back thinking job is nearly done.  But no... after copying about 70% of files, one file is not found from the CD... repeat boot, and again file not found.  I put the HDD back in, and burn another Rescue and Recovery CD, reinstall SSD and reboot and again that same file was not found.  Disaster...

  #3 trick: after booting with Rescue & Recovery CD, before doing the full factory reinstall I changed the disk to the DVD (see Step 2) and now all files were found, and a full install was made using the Windows XP supplied with my X60...

Final comment.  I had read on the Web that an SSD with Windows XP should be carefully partitioned with a start sector that starts at 64 or 128 (depending on which site you read), then formatted at 4096bytes to get the best performance.  I tried all that.  However Rescue & Recovery just changed the partitions and placed a start sector at 32 and installed the 4GB hidden partition, and whatever else.  Anyway my main priority was to get WIndows XP up and running and now the X60 is so much faster than before with the HDD, that I am beyond caring!

Good luck.

[GMAC-R60 Retired Guru]

just remember to disable diskeeper or other defrag. software you don't want to defrag the SSD harddrive

[BigBossMan]

There is a program called Diskeeper 2010 Home edition - with HyperFast.

Supposedly, it will help Windows XP out with SSDs. I did something similar with my x60, and I ended up going to a WD 500GB hard drive in the end. The Patriot Memory Warp 2 128GB SSD. SSD, which I still have, is a piece of junk for what I tried to do with it. I had TrueCrypt + XP. Granted their where a few unreasonable XP tweaks that I could have done like disable updating timestamps on files. Basically, a bunch of small writes would lock the system. Browsing webpages would even cause it to momentary freeze. I used a program called FlashFire. It fixed a lot of the problems, but if I tried to multi task too much, it would freeze for a while to catch up. FlashFire is a write cache program. It only works in bios compatibility mode. I actually researched how to create my own write cache program for XP. I was even planning to use that last Gigabyte of the 4GB of ram that I had installed. Until, I realize that there is a hard limit of 3GB of ram on the x60. I could not even access it in PAE mode. On the plus side, my laptop battery would last forever with the SSD.

Intel sounds a lot better than Patriot Memory. My x201 is fast enough with a 7200rpm hard drive that came with it. Not planning on investing in SSD technology anytime soon. It is just too expensive.

[chuckles67]

thanks for the tips.  so far so good - the Intel 80GB SSD continues to perform fast without problems.

I managed to set the Bios back to AHCI, by first installing an Intel driver for AHCI from the Lenovo driver website, then rebooting and changing the BIOS setting from compatibility to AHCI.