Recovering From System Restore Disks

[bapatterson]

I have a T42p and made the System Restore disks. I have a CD-Rom boot disk and the remainder is on a single DVD disk.

I have tried to restore to a new drive, but am having a lot of problems.

I changed the boot order so the optical drive is the first boot device. I insert the boot CD, it loads to the restore console, and stops. I click on restore to the factory install and it reboots.

After rebooting, I end up at the same console. Picking restore just repeats the process. If I chose to restore a back-up, it load a lot of files using PQI. It then says to reboot, but nothing happens after I do.

It never asks for the additional disks that are on the DVD.

I have tried it formatted to NTFS, FAT32, and unformatted. When it stops the process, the new drive has been divided up into four partitions.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

[sktn77a]

Can you re-burn the recovery onto CD-Rs? The DVD should (?) work...... Sounds like there is a problem on the first disk, though. You could try calling IBM - tell them the recovery CD burning option doesn't work and that you shouldn't have to pay for a set of original recovery CDs (?)

[bapatterson]

I don't think the DVD in lieu of 6 CDs is part of the problem. When the DVD was made, Recovery and Restore just copied all the files to the DVD instead of asking me to insert new disks as it would if I was using smaller CDs. Another poster on this board previously said the same thing. Finally, the restore never gets to the point where it asks for another disk, whether it be a CD or a DVD.

I don't want to give up just yet and say the boot disk is defective. It seems to be ok. I'm still thinking that I just don't know what I am doing to give it the right prompts to restore the factory contents.