Product Recovery CD 1 of 6 won't boot

[Paul Unger]

I suspect this question has been asked before, but obviously my search abilities aren't what they need to be (since I couldn't find anything... ). So I'm posting a new topic.

I want to reinstall Windows XP on my T61. I have a set of 8 discs from Lenovo (they came with the machine--I did not create them): Rescue and Recovery CD 1 of 1, Product Recovery CD 1-6 of 6, and Supplemental Product Recovery CD 1 of 1. Booting the Rescue and Recovery CD starts up Rescue and Recovery 4 and gives me dire warnings that my drive will be formatted and everything will be lost. I don't want my whole drive to be formatted! I put My Documents on a separate partition from Windows (and other programs) in the hopes that I could reinstall Windows without losing my data. I just want to wipe C:\ and reinstall Windows XP (and all my other programs). Will the Rescue and Recovery CD take me through the Windows installation thing where you select which partition you want to install Windows on? Or will it wipe the whole drive and put everything back to factory contents? I tried booting Product Recovery CD 1 of 6, but it wouldn't even boot (yes, CD is top of the boot order in BIOS; I also manually selected it from F12 Boot List). I suspect there's something wrong with that. Any clues?

I just wish this process wasn't so confusing... Restore, Repair, Recover, Reinstall--mind boggling! Thanks for any help.

[Harryc]

Rescue & Recovery wipes the entire drive.

[thetimerider]

Good morning,
My R51 R&R disc's wipes the entire drive and 1of 1 is the boot cd and 1-7 of 7 are not bootable, they just download everything into the IBM preload partition. At the end of all the cd's it shuts down, restarts in R&R partition and gives the option to restore back to factory install as it did when cd 1 of 1 went in, this time it will load everything onto c drive without inserting any cd's. Ive never done it this way but will try it soon, if youre service partition is intact its my understanding you dont need to use the cd's you can wipe and restore drive c from the service partition i dont know if it gives you options to format only c or multple partitions. Someone with more experience maybe could answer that.

[Paul Unger]

Well, I backed up my data partition and did the R&R thing. Good thing I backed up--everything was gone... Including--and this was surprising (in a bad way!)--the SD card I had in the card reader slot. So, word to the wise: if you're restoring with R&R, remove your SD card first!

@ thetimerider: my service partition was not intact... I had done a dual-boot setup at one point and my (limited) understanding is that that screws up the MBR, so it was not accessible. At least I couldn't access it (I tried).

A final note on my experience: twice now Windows has failed to start. Both times I could just barely see the WindowsXP spalsh screen (which slowly comes into view). So the boot got to the beginning of the splash screen and then stalled. Has anyone else seen this? Otherwise, things went well.

[RealBlackStuff]

Does the LCD have a reddish/pinkish color at startup?
If so, the CCFL is on its last legs.
If not, the inverter is on its last legs.