Accessing data on recovery CDs

[spwhitty]

I have a new T43 that did not include the recovery partition. I also do not have an i386 dir on the harddrive. I was able to get the recovery CDs from IBM. Before receiving the CDs, I tried using various copies of the i386 dir that I have found (my own WinXP Pro Retail CD, a friend's Dell OEM restore CD) and have not had luck doing a clean install as per the sticky guide in the Windows OS forum, because my product key is failing to match with the install CDs (using retail, Dell OEM files, etc.) I have created.

I would really like to be able to try again with the recovery CDs that I just received, but I have been unable to figure out how to access the i386 dir on the recovery disks. The files are archived in some way. What I need to do is locate the directory and copy it to my hard disk. Someone mentioned in the Clean Install sticky that they found utilities in C:\IBMTOOLS\UTILS to access the files, but I have not had any luck.

The actual boot CD (there is one boot CD and 6 product recovery CDs) has an i386 dir on it. However, it is only 158MB in size and is clearly not the complete set of i386 install files. This CD is used to setup the recovery environment on the hard disk, but it does not contain all of the Windows setup files.

Has anyone figured out how to do this? Thanks!