Rescue w/o Cd's or F11

[emeraldgirl08]

Is it remotely possible to activate the Recovery partition w/o the CD's or the F11 option???

I'm desperate.

After cloning my XP is behaving hesitant and not as fast as my 4200! I'm typing this from a LiveCD of Jaunty. TG for Linux LiveCD's

[Harryc]

If the recovery partition exists, and the issue is just that the MBR on the drive was overwritten, you can try to repair it using the Lenovo Repair Diskette.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

If that fails to fix things, you are up the proverbial creek.... until the Recovery Discs arrive.

[emeraldgirl08]

Thanks Harry!

Wow. It's asking me to insert a 1.44 diskette and I don't have one. Any ideas if we can use an blank SD card? Or some other format?

[RealBlackStuff]

That program only extracts onto a floppy.
YGPM

[Treefrogfarmer]

Ummmmm. I hate to jump in here, but the MBR repair program also has a bootable CD ISO. I found it on the same Lenovo support page as the repair diskette. It's slightly larger, about 1.6 megs since it is a torito style boot cd.
I used Isoburner to burn my copy.

[emeraldgirl08]

Treefrogfarmer. Where??? You'd save me a little money if you'd share

[Treefrogfarmer]

There is a discussion about repairing the MBR using GRUB on the Thinkwiki. This is one method. I just googled Rescue and Recovery Thinkwiki. This discussion revolves around Recovery version 3.
I'm trying to back track to the exact page for the MBR ISO. I believe if you search Lenovo support pages for MBR repair kit, you will find a slightly different page than the link supplied by RealBlackStuff.

[emeraldgirl08]

Found it!

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62978

I'm going to try it out. BBL w/ a report.

Emerald

[emeraldgirl08]

I got:

Read Current Driver () error 65536
Safeguard Easy was not found on this computer
This program did not make any changes.

Translation: ARGH!!!



What is Safeguard doing on my computer and why is the Rescue and Recovery partition on my computer still? I know that for a fact my programs and apps don't take up 9 gb of storage. I don't store Music or Movies on my laptop I use a SDHC/CF/Mp3's burned on DVD to store music.

[RealBlackStuff]

For those people who don't have a floppy drive:
http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

[emeraldgirl08]

Okay. I give up. RBS you got PM.

From what I've read there are ways to do this- IF YOU HAVE THE PATIENCE AND TIME!

It involves all kinds of **** (can you tell I'm frustrated?). I just did a cloning yesterday and don't want to muck up things in my new HD. If you want links just Google Rescue and Recovery like Treefrogfarmer said.

[Treefrogfarmer]

Emerald, you may be "WELL and TRULY" stonkered. SafeGuard Easy is a full disk encryption program with some ugly little surprises built into the MBR.
What is the provenance of the disk you are attempting to clone to? I suspect it is not a drive pristine and new from the mfg. If it is a used drive, it may have been fully encrypted at one time before wiping, and you now have the leftover artefacts of SafeGuard Easy littering your MBR.
The sad truth is cloning is not always a simple and "done once" event.

[emeraldgirl08]

Okay here's the skinny on my sitch.

I bought this T30 from ebay for $120. I received it factory preset. It had no service packs and asked for registration when I booted it up. I have no idea whose hands the laptop was in when I got it except that it was a corporate laptop.

It came with a SHOWSTOPPING 256 mb of RAM and a 40 Gb 4200 rpm Hard Drive!!!



I am grateful to have my own comp but I know that with a little tweaking and customization to it I can make this thing SWEET

Pre-Service Packs, .Net Framework, and Windows updates it ran pretty good. Click on something and it responded with a swift execution. After all the nonsense (updates) that makes M$ so evil it trudged along at a whimsical snails pace. I ordered a stick of 512 RAM for it and it has improved exceedingly well. So well that the Page file is pretty much untouched and the RAM has MB's left with my day-to-day operations.

Now I installed Linux and it being my first time must have overwritten the MBR. I've ordered Recovery Disks so hopefully *fingers crossed* that should help. I've noticed that after resizing the partition for Windows while installing Linux is that it's slow here in M$ land. I've replaced that 4200 HD with a 5400 HD to see if that helps. It hasn't. I'm thinking in my NOOB-ness I didn't install the Linux optimally. I've read threads and am a member of Ubuntu forums so I'm going to factory reset my T30 and go from there. I've run a LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and it works with my Laptop.

I could get on the internet last night using wireless and used bluetooth to transfer files to my PDA.

I want it

So that's my story and my current mission.

[Treefrogfarmer]

Good Luck on the restore,Emeraldgirl. My own experience with Restore and Recovery was quite positive. I ordered the factory refresh set for my X30 at approx 10:30 AM and they were at my door at 10:00 AM the next morning!
I like Ubuntu 9.04 but my heart belongs to Knoppix
If you are doing a "Mulligan" on the clone and install, take a look at the article in Thinkwiki about dual booting with Linux. GRUB does a good job, and can be finessed by using a boot sector at /boot not in the MBR, say at about 250 Megs. The disussion also touches on using the XP native boot mgr to boot the Linux and totally evading the question of messin' with the little undocumented flag that R&R puts in the MBR to use the IBM Access key.

[emeraldgirl08]

Good Luck on the restore,Emeraldgirl. My own experience with Restore and Recovery was quite positive. I ordered the factory refresh set for my X30 at approx 10:30 AM and they were at my door at 10:00 AM the next morning!
I like Ubuntu 9.04 but my heart belongs to Knoppix
If you are doing a "Mulligan" on the clone and install, take a look at the article in Thinkwiki about dual booting with Linux. GRUB does a good job, and can be finessed by using a boot sector at /boot not in the MBR, say at about 250 Megs. The disussion also touches on using the XP native boot mgr to boot the Linux and totally evading the question of messin' with the little undocumented flag that R&R puts in the MBR to use the IBM Access key.

Thanks SO much for your help Treefrogfarmer!!!

And you too Mr. RBS!!!

I will read more on manual partitioning this weekend! I have a pretty basic idea of things and know where to look but extra links are always appreciated!

Have a good weekend