I have a message for all those who don't like IBM Recovery

[lvlolvlo]

Okay, I just got my hands on a set of recovery cd's that a friend of mine wanted to use on her thinkpad. So to make a long story short she wanted me to handle it for her.

Now for the interesting part, she received 5 CDs, 4 of which were the actual recovery CDs and one was an update for Security Update CD for Access Support. Now people who have done the recovery process before you have seen two different screens, one where there’s two status bars (entire process, and copy process *I think*) and the other screen where it is deflating all the recovery files. Well I never got to the second screen! Here’s what happened.

I powered on the notebook I inserted the CD and pressed the F12 key to choose a “Temp Boot Device.” It booted the recovery CD asked me if wanted to restore the IBM partition I said no and then I said yes to all the other junk telling me that it will erase all data and recover to factory contents. After this it started the copy process then it asked me to insert CD 2, to which I did and it finished up the copy process and asked me to place CD 1 back into the drive so I did and then it asked me to reboot. *NOW REMEMBER I DIDN’T CHANGE THE BOOT ORDER IN THE BIOS I JUST SLECTED A TEMPORARY BOOT DEVICE* So it rebooted but not from the CD but instead from Windows XP Pro. Win XP loaded up and then asked me to activate, so I called up Microsoft, it told me it was an invalid key so I click “Change Product Key” and typed in the product key that was on the bottom of the unit and called again and this time it activated fine. Yes granted I botched up a perfectly good installation, but hey now I found out how to get a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro. You would need to tweak it a little bit, like load the proper graphics card driver, sound, eth, wnic, etc but hey IT’S XP PRO w/out IBM JUNK.

Now just remember I did this by accident so yeah….I forgot to change the boot order in bios and just selected a temp boot device. Anyway I hope this helps out you people that are on a continuous conquest to get win xp pro to oem from ibm.


Sorry for any typos. misspellings, grammatical errors, etc...