I backed up my machine, copied a bunch of data to both a thumb drive as well as the second hard drive on my W510, and get ready to install Windows 7 x64.

First I had to add memory. I had put 8GB in the bottom slot, but to replace the 4GB with 8GB in the top slots, I had to remove the keyboard. It’s actually easy, unscrew two screws (all the way out), pop out the keyboard, and then replace memory. The underneath slot is hard to reach, but it only took me about 5 minutes to upgrade to 16GB.

Now time for Windows. Nervously I put the x64 image in the DVD drive (replacing it in the 2nd bay) and booting. Windows setup loaded and started and….

Stopped. No DVD driver found. Slightly amusing to me since I had booted from the DVD drive. I tried again, and then went downstairs to search the ‘net. I found a few references but no drivers. The drivers on the Lenovo site were an install, which won’t work during setup. I downloaded Intel drivers, but those didn’t work. To top it off, my laptop was now not booting into the old Windows, saying I needed to run repair. I suspect setup has some boot files there, but now I was really nervous.

I read on a Lenovo forum that someone had a similar issue and fixed it with a new .iso download. So I burned a new Windows x64 DVD from MSDN and tried that. Success!!

Now the install is running and my fingers are crossed. We’ll see how well this works.

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