Enabling F11 Recovery on X31/T41/T43

[searing]

I'm missing something obvious, I think. I can usually resolve technical problems bu this has me beat. I have several Thinkpads (X31, T41, T43), none of which give the F11 recovery option when Access IBM is pressed on startup.
I have replaced/upgraded the HD on the X31 to a 160Gb Hitachi disk and restored from the restore CD set (purchased from Lenovo) - and still no F11 option appears.
I'm contemplating applying the R&R upgrade offered on the Lenovo site for the X31 - will this give me anything extra, or not until I've resolved the F11 problem?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer!

[Ken Fox]

I'm missing something obvious, I think. I can usually resolve technical problems bu this has me beat. I have several Thinkpads (X31, T41, T43), none of which give the F11 recovery option when Access IBM is pressed on startup.
I have replaced/upgraded the HD on the X31 to a 160Gb Hitachi disk and restored from the restore CD set (purchased from Lenovo) - and still no F11 option appears.
I'm contemplating applying the R&R upgrade offered on the Lenovo site for the X31 - will this give me anything extra, or not until I've resolved the F11 problem?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer!

There are 2 possible issues:

(1) you may have lost your service partition. It is possible that your recovery disks did not make one, or if you used cloning software, that did not copy it. If there is no service partition than there is nothing to boot into with F11. Please note that the service partition has evolved over time and would not be the same across all 3 machines. I have an ancient set of X31 recovery disks that WILL NOT make a recovery partition of any type. I don't know why that it, but it did not make one for me, or for a person I sent a copy to in the past.

If you still have the hard disk from the X31, and you have not removed its contents, then you could clone that disk and put it back onto your new hard disk in the X31. Search this website for posts on "cloning a hard disk," which will show you how this is done with programs such as Norton Ghost 2003 or Acronis True Image.

(2) You may have lost the specific IBM-Lenovo Master Boot Record, which is what enables the blue button and might possibly be needed for F11 to work. This can be repaired with a floppy disk that you can make from a program you have to download off the Lenovo site. Do a search here on Thinkpads.com for "MBR Repair" and you will find posts referencing the link for this download.