Thinkpads Forum

I decided to make a fresh install of Windows XP on my IBM X41 two days ago following a guide I had found on this forum.

I decided to leave the service partition untouched and just reinstall as the partitions are now.

Everything is running nicely in windows but I was curious if I could make the service utility available somehow. When I press the blue Access IBM button during boot it just let me choose to enter Bios setup or continue booting into Windows.

If there is any smart way to actually enable this service partition then I'd like to do that. Else I will repartition my hard drive.

You can try the following.

Rescue and Recovery - Recovery repair diskette

Thx Gom.
Since I haven't got an ultrabase do you know if it is able to convert it so that I could boot from a CD instead? I don't know how to make such convertions.
I haven't got an USB floppy disk.

Well... Sadly it didn't work.

I managed to create a by using UBCD and following this guide (of course not putting Partition Magic on the disc )
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/convert.html



The crazy thing was that the first two or three options I tried to select in the IBM Utility caused the system to be non-bootable in any way. I couldn't boot to Windows and I was starting to get really sad.

Luckily after choosing Option B which should support the old versions of Rapid Restore PC and the main operating system environment I was able to boot to Windows XP again but the service partition still didn't work.

But at least I didn't have to reinstall Windows and drivers and software all over again.



EDIT: Update coming up on this since when I tried to play around with it again and then just wanted to choose Options B again it booted into the service partition. Now I have to figure out if Windows is still working :S

I ended up booting into Rescue & Recovery several times without being able to change anything useful in there.

And next time I tried to boot the IBM Utility through the Ultimate Boot CD it just froze loading PC Dos.
Then I decided to just check out the file system utilities on the boot cd and choose a partitions manager. I selected the primary partition as the active / bootable partition and next time it booted into Windows.

But now the service partition is visible which is wasn't earlier (even though I had also tried to choose Disable in bios).
I guess I will just format this partition and use it for something useful such as storing personal documents and so on.
That way a reinstall won't be that extensive next time.