Questions on a 535 MB hidden partition restoring factory con

[shorttimer1]

I had a T42 I bought new at the end of 2004. It failed me a few months ago so I sold it for parts on eBay. Removed the COA sticker as well as the hard drive before I sold it. Saturday I saw a T42p at a garage sale for $50 so I bought it. Very nice machine, they just wanted something smaller. It had only a 40GB drive which was filled with garbage and no restore partition. So I installed my old t42 drive as I wanted to create a set of recovery cds. It said I had already done that, which I did but then tossed them after my original T42 broke. But then I tried to restore to factory contents, which I have done a lot in the past. This time it asked me to put in product CD #1 which it never has in the past. I looked at the recovery partition and it is only 535MB. Seems like it was bigger in the past. It is up and working fine but I was hoping to get a restore partition put on it. Any suggestions or should I just buy a recovery set of CDs. Just wondering if there is anything in that 535MB partition that can help me creat the recovery cds.

Thanks!

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the Forum.
Looks like your recovery partition is corrupt. It should be at least ~1.5GB.
Only way to get things going again is by obtaining a recovery set of CDs.
Before you apply them, wipe the HD with Killdisk or DBAN, both free on the web.
Try the Market Forum for those CDs, or buy direct from Lenovo for ca. $45.-