Recovery CDs for a T42? Where did I go wrong?!

[basement_blues]

I have a T42 (2378-XXR) running XP Pro. I decided to reformat and reinstall everything (part of a general tune-up) and immediately ran into problems. The saga is long, so I'll cut to the chase. I couldn't return the machine to its original state using the Rescue and Recovery hardware that's on the partition (part of the Access IBM area). The machine copied all the needed files and said it was complete. It then prompted me to restart it; after that, a black screen appeared and it copied more files that would be needed (showing them all in white DOS type letters). Then the machine finally booted, played the Windows music, and the desktop appeared. There was a checklist of tasks it was running through (part of the Factory Restore process.) But it would only get through plug-n-play and then have a fatal error while installing drivers. The machine would hit a blue screen of death: The error was "IRQL not less or equal." The machine would then reboot, attempt a partition check, dump some stuff into a file, get the same error again, reboot, do the partition check again....

I then tried to restore the system with a CD I had made many years ago, but it turned out this was only the Rescue and Recovery program CD. It just took me into the Access IBM screen (loading it all from the CD). Eventually to go through with the whole process, it asked for the first Recovery CD. But I never made the rest of the CDs, either out of ignorance or I thought for some reason I wouldn't need them. Obviously that was a serious mistake.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the process, it looks like there's no way to get back the factory configuration. The whole process is stuck in limbo. (If I manually shut the machine off, then turn it on again, it asks for the first Recovery CD). The only thing I can do is get into BIOS. I guess the upside is that I made backups of all my personal data, so that's not at risk.

Is the only way to proceed at this point is to get the recovery CDs? How do I obtain those? I have a valid license and know the Microsoft reg. code, etc. The sticker's on the bottom of my machine.

Any help would be appreciated. This has turned out to be very frustrating. Even more frustrating than the time the motherboard died and I bought a new one (from a very nice person on this forum) and reinstalled it myself.

[RealBlackStuff]

Put a Looking-For (LF:) ad in the Marketforum. Someone will come to the rescue.

[basement_blues]

Thanks for the reply. I just posted there.

[MisterB]

You got 99% there with the restore process. You have some driver conflict and it looks like Rescue and Recovery is putting the wrong driver in somewhere. Since you changed motherboards, there was probably some slight difference in the hardware. One thing to do is to reset the BIOS to default values. If you have a USB floppy and can make a boot floppy with Fdisk, you can try to set the sevice partition active which will bring on the system restore and start the process over. You can also do this with a Linux CD and use the Linux partitioning software to make the service partition active.

[cadillacmike68]

After that, if you still get stuck, boot it and press F5 or F8 ( i can never remember which), and boot it logged. That will capture the driver causing it to crash. Then you can boot it safe mode and edit the registry to fix or temporarily remark out that driver.

[richk]

What is the FRU of the replacement board?

[basement_blues]

Thanks for the suggestions. Here's where things stand:

I tried to create a floppy with Fdisk using an old Toshiba Satellite running Win98. To create the floppy, the system wanted me to put in the Windows system disc, which I have, but the special Toshiba one. For some reason, the system didn't find what it was looking for, so I couldn't create the floppy. I borrowed another machine running WinXP Pro (a Dell) but then found out that Fdisk was removed in favor of a built-in system program (Disk Management.) All I can get on the T42 (besides the screen that wants me to insert "Product Recovery Disc 1") is the Rescue and Recovery menu, accessible when I boot from the Rescue and Recovery CD (the only one I made 5 years ago.) I can use most of the functions there (to look at system info, the events load, open a browser, get into BIOS), but I can't create diagnostic disks. When I try "Restore your system," none of the choices fit the situation. I don't have a backup of Windows and applications (I only backed up my data), and if I choose "Restore my system" to the factory state, the computer reads/copies data from the Rescue CD (which will then bring me back to the "Insert Product Recovery Disc 1."

I reverted to default values in the BIOS. If I made an MS-DOS floppy, can I use line commands to reactivate the master boot partition? If so, what are they, and what is the letter drive of the partition? Is it D:\PREBOOT?

With the change in motherboard, the hardware is now a 2379-9XU (due the 9600 graphic processor instead of the 7200 that was on the 2378). I can't find the FRU for the motherboard at the moment.

I think maybe the easiest solution will just be to get some recovery discs. I'm working on that.

I may have created the problem because when I tried to reinstall the system software the very first time I had accidentally left a sound card in the PCMCIA slot. Or maybe it was because I accidentally installed an old Touchpoint driver and then realized the system doesn't use that and I should have installed an Ultranav driver. I could never figure out how to remove the Touchpoint driver (through the settings menu or the add/remove hardware menu), by the way. This seemed to have prevented me from getting to the Ultranav dialog box to actually program the touchpad. Another problem was that I tried using the Lenovo interface to install all the drivers needed for my machine type... I realized (too late) that it only requires .NET v2, not v4. And probably I don't need to use that interface at all.... But all of this may not have been relevant. The bottom line is probably that if I just get the recovery discs and start over I can get it right.

I was pretty shocked by how many updates are (supposedly) required after upgrading to SP3. It was something like 197! Microsoft was also trying to make me install Windows Genuine Advantage, which I didn't want. How can I skip that one and not get the eternal reminder screen?

[MisterB]

It's been a long time but to put fdisk on a bootable floppy from Windows 98 you chose "Shut Down" on the Start menu and choose "Restart in MS-DOS mode". When you enter DOS, type "sys a:" to make a bootable disk. Then remove the floppy, restart and get back to Windows and you have to manually copy fdisk.exe from the "Command" folder inside the "Windows" folder to the floppy.

To restore an MBR with Fdisk the DOS command prompt is "fdisk /mbr".

Then type "fdisk" with no parameters and you should enter a menu. Choose "change active partition" and you will be able to set the recovery partition active.

There are a lot of different recovery partitions for T4X Thinkpads. It would be better to get the set of recovery CDs but, if you have a T42 motherboard, it would be better to get the T42 recovery CDs because the drivers are more likely to be for the hardware in that motherboard. I recently had a recovery partition fail with a T42P where all I had changed was the wifi card but on the other hand, I've put Windows XP Pro on an X41 Tablet with a T41 recovery partition. This was just to see if the X41T worked. I still had to order the Recovery CDs to install Windows Xp Tablet on it. So, I would try a few things while I waited but the best solution is to get the recovery CDs and, because you changed to a newer motherboard, you might need the recovery CDs for the model of your motherboard, not the one on the chassis.

[cadillacmike68]

your not going to get very far is you don'e submit to ms genuine advantage, but not to worry, your recovery CD will put a site license kewy on your instal.

Yeah that's a lot of updates - and it's still growing. But, they will not do an SP4 because there are 2 newer OSs out there, so we are stuck with it.

When I recover a T23 I'm in for it because that was only SP1 and while i have SP2 on disc i do not have SP3 on disc or in a file.

[fefrie]

XP is not so bad. I'd say it's pretty good in fact.

[basement_blues]

I've been away for awhile, so first I want to say thanks to everyone who weighed in on how to get into the protected partition through the floppy method-- and to everyone else who offered advice.

In the end I obtained the restoration disks and went that route. It turned out to be less painful than my original attempt-- because that had gone awry, it required many, many updates that normally would have been covered had the whole restoration completed itself. (For example, I wouldn't have had a problem with Ultranav, which didn't get restored when the process failed the first time.) I think the whole thing failed because I had a sound card in the PCMCIA slot that I forgot to take out.

The machine is running much better than before, though recently I put AVG free edition on it, and even though it's supposed to not take a lot of overhead, I notice a difference. But I'm only running with 512MB RAM.

[RealBlackStuff]

You should run that with at least 1.5GB or better 2GB of RAM.
And ditch AVG in favor of Avast (also free), much less overhead, and can be tweaked to minimum impact.