We have several T42p's. Well, on one of these thinkpads, 5 pages went bad on the disk, and I had to remove the disk from the housing, put it in a caddy, and run chkdsk -r on another T42. It reported the bad pages and then said something about updating the registry (I assume it replaced the bad pages with empty sectors, then somehow disabled those subsystems in the registry.)

Now come to find out, the computer does not have crypto services. This makes the 802.11 unworkable, but wired networking still works. I do not have a Windows XP CD to run "sfr /scannow". I did have an upgrade to SP3 disk and when I tried to reinstall SP3 upgrade from this disk (hoping it would overwrite the damaged files), it said, "Sorry we cannot verify the signature on the SP3 disk so we cannot begin the install."

I am wondering what is my next step ??
1. Restore from the hidden thinkpad partition? Will this wipe out the partition?
2. Find an XP installation CD? Where? Can I do a reinstall w/o crypto services?
3. Upgrade to Windows-7 Home Premium, 3-user edition?
4. Get a rescue & recovery disk?
5. Try to restore some system files from our Acronis True Image backup?

I assume the Windows keys are on the sticker on the back of the laptop (I don't have the laptop with me right now ..)

Thanks in advance,

- Don

I finally solved the problem for $15.

I bought a Dell Windows XP SP3 disk from EBay. It was a little warped but by trying 3 different CD players and bending it by hand, I got it to spin up.

I tried running networking updates from the Dell SP3 disk. There were several faults during the install and that did not fix the problem.
I tried running the DOS window (command) and going to the D: drive and running "sfc /scannow". It went through the full scan but that did not fix the problem.

Finally, I simply reinstalled Windows XP using the product keys from the bottom of the laptop. I was warned that I would lose the "Access IBM" tools but I don't think I lost them (I can always install new ones from the net). I reinstalled in "update" mode so that very little of our existing settings would be overwritten. This has finally made my laptop's wireless networking operational again.