Thinkpads Forum

My T42 came with a 30 gig hard drive that filled up pretty quickly (I use my ThinkPad as a desktop replacement), so I bought a larger (60 gig) ThinkPad drive from Lenovo last year. I used Rescue and Recovery to create an image of the old disk on an external drive, and used R&R to put the image on the new drive in the ThinkPad. Everything seemed to work fine, and the machine functions, but there are some weird problems that seem to be related to the fact that I'm not using the original disk anymore.

Paramount among these is that I can no longer remove most of the programs that had been installed on the old disk, at least not using the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. This creates some havoc when I install new software that requires me to remove old versions first, because the old versions do not get removed. So over time I've started accumulating error messages and conflicts; I can't shut down the machine without getting strings of error messages.

Any idea what I did wrong?

There was an old release of PC Doctor that created this problem on T60s, and I believe your T42 uses the same program. It was released about the time you did the upgrade, and you may have installed it. I would suggest that you obtain a new set of rescue and recovery disk from IBM. You can search the forum for the PC doctor problem. I think there was a solution that was found, didn't try it myself.

Yes, I was bitten by that PC Doctor upgrade bug on my T42.

I saw this on Microsoft's site recently. Maybe it will help. I personally have not tried it.
Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

Thanks, this sounds promising. It turns out my machine is still under warranty (until 11 November) so I was able to order a set of recovery CDs. I'll just do a clean reinstall using the CDs and start over, probably the best bet.