Thinkpads Forum

So, I have been playing with a new (used) Z61t for several weeks, and this is my first real experience with Vista as well. First thing I did was a factory restore using Rescue and Recovery. That went with no problems. After a week, I decided I would rather rid the machine of the extra applications using a clean install of Vista. I did that using ABR to restore the factory Vista activation key on an installation using another Vista disk. That also went fine. I did not delete any partitions other than the main "SW_preload" partition.

I wanted to keep the factory restore partition intact in case I ever sell the machine to someone who might want that, and it doesn't take up that much space on a 120GB drive. I can see it there in System Properties, System Protection tab, labeled as 'ServiceV002'. I decided to check to make sure I could recover again after my clean Vista install. So, I downloaded Rescue and Recovery, but it cannot see any recovery partitions, either running it, or F11 during the boot process.

Using ThinkVantage Base Software Administrator, I can see the file structure in the hidden partition, and I suppose I could build new manifest and personalization files and reinstall upon the next boot, but I am trying to make sure that I can do a factory reinstall using the standard Rescue and Recovery process.

Any thoughts?

EDIT: just to be clear, I only have Rescue and Recovery, Active Protection System, and Power Manager installed - no other ThinkVantage applications.

Anytime you install or reinstall the operating system, you will damage the MBR as far as Rescue and Recovery is concerned. For Windows, you need to apply the Rescue and Recovery - Recovery Repair Diskette.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

For Linux, you need to make some changes in Grub.

I do not recommend installing a different version of Rescue and Recovery than what was originally installed by the factory. This can lead to problems because of different versions in the Windows portion of the software compared to what is in the Service Partition.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 963#282239

No luck with the recovery diskette. I was excited that it went through all the steps cleanly (except a lot of abort, retry, fail messages were hidden behind a blue screen). But, alas, I still can't get Rescue and Recovery to display the recovery partition to allow for a factory reinstall. I can still see the file structure in place, but R+R doesn't see something it wants to see.

Still searching...

If I remember correctly, there were a couple of options with the Diskette. See the following post.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 40#p240040

One other thing. Press F11 at the BIOS splash screen to enter Rescue and Recovery. The Access IBM or ThinkVantage key may not work.

You know I think I found my problem... it looks like I had simply lost the "Factory Recovery" option in Rescue and Recovery. Oh, and I am using Vista SP2 32-bit, and having no problems now with R&R, so it does not appear that there is any R&R issue with SP2, at least in a 32-bit installation.

When I did a clean install of Vista, I installed Rescue and Recovery to see if it would still allow me to recover with the factory preinstall, but the utility showed no Backups and there was no "Factory recovery" selection option (not that I was looking for it, but if it was there, I would have had some way to enable the "Restore" button on that screen. But because I didn't see any Backups available, that's all I continued to check for every time I booted into R&R thereafter. I had assumed that something was wrong with the backup partition because R&R looked to be working fine and it appeared that just the factory preinstall wasn't showing up in the list of backups.

In the process of trying other things, I did end up doing a second clean install of Vista, and installing and reinstalling Rescue and Recovery on top of that. Based on this post that I found, I double checked and realized that the Factory recovery is now available to me and the "Restore" button is enabled, so it looks like everything is clean. Now, I am still wondering if reinstalling R&R solved my problem or if repairing the boot record did the trick.

Regardless, thanks for all the help. With all the discussion I found about removing the factory preinstall partition, I hope that some of these threads linked here will help people who want to keep the partition intact for various reasons. I did a pretty extensive search but could not find them on my own, but I was obviously searching the wrong terms.

Thanks again!