Reseting to Factory State with Product Recovery Disks

[eecon]

I purchased from eBay and received yesterday a 4 month old slightly used mint condition T61p that came with Vista Business 32 and looked like all the previous owner's personal docs and files were erased. However, I noticed that the previous owner's name and company and email address were still listed on the Lenovo Registration page and the computer was still assigned a network name ID.

Should I assume that the unit was not actually reset using the service partition or recovery disks?

Please note that I was able to burn a fresh set of recovery disks, however I understand that does not ensure that the unit was actually reset to factory state.

I checked the serial number with Lenovo before purchase to see if the unit may have been reported stolen and they had no reports of theft. After receiving the unit yesterday, I emailed the newly discovered person and company listed as the previous registrant at the email address given on the Lenovo registration page. I am currently awaiting a reply by phone or email as to the legal status of the unit. Although the eBay seller has over 13,000 sales with a 99.7% postive feedback over the last 7 years, the fact that the seller is affiliated with a large pawn shop in a suburban township near Minneapolis, MN cautions me to check further with the newly discovered previous owner (who is also located near Minneapolis).

Is there anything more I can or should do at this point? If I do not hear back from the previous owner or their company within a few days (or a week at most), what would be my next logical step? Contacting all 20+ separate police departments around the metro Minneaplis area?

I'm sure others here on the Forum have been through a similar situation before .... thanks.

[PhilD]

what if the previous owner / company calls you back and says "yes, that was stolen from me and i want it back"? have you thought about that? who's fibbing then, the dude you bought it from or the previous owner who claims it's his?

you did the right thing by checking with Lenovo before you purchased it, but i'm not sure how far you could reasonably be expected to pursue it. if you ask enough people, you are bound to find somebody who says it theirs whether it is or not - not everyone shares the same values you do.

as far as the hard drive is concerned, i personally would boot to the recovery startup disc you created and recover the system to factory fresh. it doesn't take too long and you know you are starting from a factory install.

[carbon_unit]

If Lenovo said it wasn't stolen I would go with that.
Pressing F11 at boot up will allow you to restore it to factory condition from the on-board restore partition and remove all of the previous owners info too. You can run the discs if you want to but it still ends up with the same result.

[eecon]

what if the previous owner / company calls you back and says "yes, that was stolen from me and i want it back"? have you thought about that? who's fibbing then, the dude you bought it from or the previous owner who claims it's his?

You did the right thing by checking with Lenovo before you purchased it, but i'm not sure how far you could reasonably be expected to pursue it. if you ask enough people, you are bound to find somebody who says it theirs whether it is or not - not everyone shares the same values you do.

Thanks everyone for the advice .... I really appreciate your thoughts on this.

I've spoken with police about these kind of things before and they say if no timely theft report was filed, then there is nothing the police can or will do. So unless the previous owner can produce a verifiable police report that was submitted before the auction listing began (about two weeks ago), there is nothing they can really claim or do (except go after the eBay seller).

Anyway, I'm still protected by the seller's 14 day return policy plus eBay plus PayPal plus Mastercard.

To the seller's credit, I've checked the online police department reports of the town where the eBay seller is located and there are several recent police reports where the shop refused to buy items that had the S/N removed and they had to call the police to respond to the premises to arrest the people attempting to sell the items (after those people became threating and menacing) .... must be a rough neighborhood located about 50 miles across town on the other side of the metro area where the previous owner lives in an upscale suburban residential neighborhood.

As for Lenovo, all they would say is that the serial number has not been flagged as stolen but they cautioned that over 50% of all laptops stolen never get reported to them for one reason or another

[eecon]

If Lenovo said it wasn't stolen I would go with that.
Pressing F11 at boot up will allow you to restore it to factory condition from the on-board restore partition and remove all of the previous owners info too. You can run the discs if you want to but it still ends up with the same result.

Thanks for the advice. I currently have plans for that unit's HDD to be cloned into a Lenovo OEM WinXP drive as part of my backup strategy ..... no use for Vista, other than I explored around with it for a day and don't particulary like it. But testing a full system reset to factory state with the Vista recovery disks that I made sounds like a good test of the recovery disks .... I'll do that first and then later make the HDD a cloned backup for my WinXP system with Acronis TI v11.

BTW, my T61's 200 Gb HDD with WinXP works just fine when swapped into the newly arrived T61p .... just like twins only the "p" seems much faster and scores more than double that of my T61 on 3DMark06

[eecon]

As the OP, I thought it appropriate to bring closure to my concern about the legal status of the laptop I received via eBay. I got a reply today from the police department at the city where the eBay seller is located who investigated my email request by S/N and the original owners name:

"My name is xxx xxxxxxxxxx and I’m a Detective with the xxxxxxxxxxx PD. I was given your request about the laptop. I was able to determine the laptop was sold by the owner to xxxxx xxxxxxxx so it’s clear and there shouldn’t be any problems. If you have any questions feel free to E-mail me or I can be reached at xxx-xxx-xxxx."

I guess that all's well that ends well ..... it is a very nice mint unit for less than half what I priced it out new just last August at very end of new T61p sales from Lenovo Direct (including my faculty university 34% discount!!)