Thinkpads Forum

I got quite annoyed today:

I've installed Rescue & Recover 2.0 (after correctly de-installing 1.0)
In its user guide it says to create a new set of Recovery CDs with RR 2.0.
I tried to do so, but the Recovery Disk program tells me I've already
created a set and won't be allowed to create another one and to call IBM Help Centre. So I do.

At IBM Technical Support Center a quite bold lady tells me that
that I must have made a mistake somewhere and that she want's
to charge me 60 EUR for software support.
I'm quit upset about this. Especially as the my Thinkpad shows intermittend BSODs 0xA IRQL_... recently. And a proper set of Recovery CDs could by useful in near future.

What I did in past was
* with RR V1.0 I created the Recovery CDs
* with RR V2.0 I created a HDD as recovery medium as a test
and deleted it again
because I didn't want to wast a complet 80 GB HDD for ~800 MB recovery data.
(The "Create Recovery on HDD"-process deleted all my partitions on that HDD.)

How can one burn a new set of Recovery Disks, as the User Guide for Rescue & Recovery suggest it?

lophiomys wrote:I've installed Rescue & Recover 2.0 (after correctly de-installing 1.0) In its user guide it says to create a new set of Recovery CDs with RR 2.0. I tried to do so, but the Recovery Disk program tells me I've already created a set and won't be allowed to create another one and to call IBM Help Centre.

How can one burn a new set of Recovery Disks, as the User Guide for Rescue & Recovery suggest it?

You are confusing Rescue Media with Recovery CD's. You can burn as many copies of Rescue Media as you like. You can only burn (1) copy of the Recovery CD set. If you go to: Start > All Programs > Access IBM, you will see (2) different listings: 'Create Recovery Discs' and 'Create Rescue Media'.

The Recovery CD's restore your hard drive to the state it came in, when it arrived from the factory. If you use them, all data on the hard drive will be deleted.

The Rescue Media allows you to boot up on a CD, when you can't boot into Windows or the Rescue and Recovery workspace from the hard disk. Using the rescue media, you can copy files off of the hard drive to another media, repair Windows, restore from a backup that you have made previously, and even access the internet.

See following copied from the Rescue and Recovery readme file:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consideration 15
To restore original factory contents on computers that have the Rescue
and Recovery 1.0 program installed, reinstall the Rescue and Recovery
program after restoring the original factory contents. After reinstalling
the Rescue and Recovery 2.0 program perform a backup operation . It is a
good idea to dispose of old rescue media and to create new rescue media
after the Rescue and Recovery 2.0 program is reinstalled.

Thanks for pointing that out. That solved it.
Indeed as you say, I confused Recovery CDs with Rescue Media.


It seems I was allowing the German wording for these
IBM menu items to confuse me.
- CDs oder DVDs zur Wiederherstellung erstellen = Recovery CDs = RecCD.exe
vs.
- Datenträger zur Wiederherstellung erstellen = Rescue Media = CRM.exe

A pitty that IBM Support coudn't clarify that on the phone.

For whomever it may concern, have a look in the Registry at
HKCU/.../RNR Boot Media/Done

Heh.. nice reg key.

Also, if you Restore your system to factory defaults, you can then burn a second set.

lophiomys wrote:have a look in the Registry at HKCU/.../RNR Boot Media/Done

That does not seem to be enough. If you have the Rescue and Recovery Tools installed, you can use: Otherwise you need 2 restarts: Then: Edit: For R&R 3.0, replace above \ibmtools\utils\spi with "\Program Files\IBM ThinkVantage\Common\spi", \ibmtools\utils\bmgr32 with "\Program Files\IBM ThinkVantage\Common\bmgr\bmgr32", \ibmtools\rrcd with "\Program Files\IBM ThinkVantage\Rescue and Recovery\rrcd", and use start->All Programs->ThinkVantage->Create Recovery Media->Recovery Discs. Note that the first disc (Rescue and Recovery Startup) can be 1 CD-R/CD-RW/DVD±R/DVD±RW but only ~433 MB of it are used. The following discs can be either 5 CD-R/CD-RW or 1 DVD±R/DVD±RW/DVD-RAM (R&R 2.0 would only write 700 MB on a DVD-R but the complete data on a DVD+RW/DVD-RAM, so that seems to be fixed in R&R 3.0).