Thinkpads Forum

does IBM/Lenovo asks for serial number and everything ?
Sticker becomes difficult to read, under the lappy

Press the Access IBM button. Go to: Get Help & Support > Find support information > Warranty and parts information. Your serial number will be displayed.

thibouille27 wrote:does IBM/Lenovo asks for serial number and everything ?....(

Ordered a set a few days ago for my youngsters T41p. I was asked for model number and serial number. Discs were sent free, as laptop is still under warranty. They said it would take about 10 days, but in fact took 5. (Hence delighted.)

Thanks both of you

Nick Y wrote:Ordered a set a few days ago for my youngsters T41p. I was asked for model number and serial number. Discs were sent free, as laptop is still under warranty. They said it would take about 10 days, but in fact took 5. (Hence delighted.)

How did you manage that? IBM quoted me $45 for my T40 (still in warranty).

My T41 doesn't have a DVD/CDRW instead only has a DVD-ROM drive. I complained that I was not able to make a set of Recovery CD's for my laptop (still in warranty) and IBM said they would send me a set for free (which they did and I have used).

I have a CDRW but I don't see any feature that allows me to burn recovery CDs.

Geoff_AZ wrote:I have a CDRW but I don't see any feature that allows me to burn recovery CDs.

You need to use Rescue and Recovery 3 which burns recovery CD's from the Recovery partition of the HDU.

Go to All Programs/ThinkVantage/Create Recovery Media

First CD is the Rescue & recovery -and must be a CD; remaining can be 5 or 6 CDs or one DVD.

Nick Y wrote:Go to All Programs/ThinkVantage/Create Recovery Media

First CD is the Rescue & recovery -and must be a CD; remaining can be 5 or 6 CDs or one DVD.

Thanks for the info--I don't have that application installed. I'm downloading RNR v3.1 now and will see if that contains the create recovery media program.

Geoff_AZ wrote:

Nick Y wrote:Thanks for the info--I don't have that application installed. I'm downloading RNR v3.1 now and will see if that contains the create recovery media program.

I think that 3.1 will put 'Create Rec Media' into 'all programs' for you. If not there, for some reason, look for:
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Lenovo\spi\RRMedia.exe" , which is the properties of the above.

Nick Y wrote:Go to All Programs/ThinkVantage/Create Recovery Media

First CD is the Rescue & recovery -and must be a CD; remaining can be 5 or 6 CDs or one DVD.

No it can be DVD... kinda stupid but it makes no problem, I can prove it since I used it

Thanks to all -- I was able to burn the recovery CD (it only asked for one disc) after downloading the latest RNR. I haven't tried to boot from it yet.

Geoff_AZ wrote:Thanks to all -- I was able to burn the recovery CD (it only asked for one disc) after downloading the latest RNR. I haven't tried to boot from it yet.

I believe you burned a Rescue Media Disc, which does indeed fit on one CD/R. With it you can boot into Rescue and Recovery. However, this disk alone will not put the OS and factory software on a new hard drive. You need the Product Recovery Discs (more than one).

One way you can find out for certain is if the disc contains over 1 GB of data, it must be more than the Rescue Media Disc. The Rescue Media Disc fits on one CD, which has about 650-700 MB in data capacity. I would suspect the Product Recovery Discs contain about 4-5 GB of data

GomJabbar wrote: I believe you burned a Rescue Media Disc, which does indeed fit on one CD/R. With it you can boot into Rescue and Recovery. However, this disk alone will not put the OS and factory software on a new hard drive. You need the Product Recovery Discs (more than one).

One way you can find out for certain is if the disc contains over 1 GB of data, it must be more than the Rescue Media Disc. The Rescue Media Disc fits on one CD, which has about 650-700 MB in data capacity. I would suspect the Product Recovery Discs contain about 4-5 GB of data

Well, I certainly didn't burn that much; it was only one CD (and my drive, it's a T40, can't write to DVDs). I'll have to look again to see if I can burn the whole recovery set.

One other thing of note. I'd nuked the MBR with a fresh SP2 install of XP; the RNR installation rewrote the MBR and hitting the Access IBM button worked again.