Thinkpads Forum

Has anyone ordered Recovery CD sets from the folks at

thinkpad ~ recoverycds ~ dot ~ com ???

And I'm NOT trying to promote a site.

I did (order, not promote), and their site is now suspended, whatever that means (probably didn't pay up their annual ISP fee!).

I ordered 2 T43 sets, both XPP one for integrated graphics and 1 for discrete graphics. They arrived and look to be correct. they are different from each other and there were only two T43 sets for XPP.

I also ordered two sets for T61, and i specified machine type of 8897 (My wife's) and 6463 (my new one), both of which their site distilled to the same set of discs. There are / were two different sets for t61, from my checking of Machine types, one is for all the types with NVidia and the other is for Intel graphics (but apparently not so).

These also arrived, but they machine types on disks 1-6 of the 6 disc XPP set do not have any of my T61 machine types on them. Who knows, I'm not about to "test" them out on a working t61, but maybe when i get that spare SATA drive I'll use it as a guinea pig. The other seat was a vista pack for T62, and that one defies logic in the wording on the discs.

They are all new original IBM and / or Lenovo Discs, but the web site being suspended has me wondering.

Any thoughts?

Sounds like a site I used about three years ago. I got a set and used it without incident. At the time, someone on the forum suggested the operators had acquired IBM's inventory of R&R disks and was selling them, but w/o permission. They may have come back to life and been squashed again. As I remember, the disks looked authentic.

Got a set for a x201 from them. They were labelled x201 but were actually x200 discs - the .txt file on the disc confirmed that.
They worked - sort of - four or five drivers had to added manually.

Was a pain to get a refund, had to open a Paypal dispute.

YMMV

91011 wrote: They worked - sort of - four or five drivers had to added manually.

YMMV

A similar story here. Ordered a set of recovery disks for a G41 (good luck finding these anywhere), nVidia driver was missing, but apart from that worked well. They probably were for the G40 unit, but I was pleased to get *anything* for the long-since-forgotten-model at that point in the game...

The discs look completely genuine (and the T43 sets are only in case i ever get a T43), and after looking at all the machine types listed on the discs and the date (a 2007 date), they may actually be the correct XPP T61 set, because all but two of the Machine types on the discs are Intel graphics machines and the two Nvdia types listed are early 14" WS model T61s.

I harbor no illusions about the need to go and update EVERY driver after using a recovery CD set and the need to go through an equally painful windows update, but if that's the only way back from a serious failure or screw-up then It's better having the disc set than not.

If I can dig up their phone # I'll call them; web site is still down (or blocked).

These are probably chinese knock-offs, they have factories producing copies of any disc you can imagine and that would explain the (less the perfect) match... it's a lot easier to fake the disc lable then to re-engineer the disc to an exact model so they probably use the same source disc for making several versions.

TuuS wrote:These are probably chinese knock-offs, they have factories producing copies of any disc you can imagine and that would explain the (less the perfect) match... it's a lot easier to fake the disc lable then to re-engineer the disc to an exact model so they probably use the same source disc for making several versions.

Hmmmmmm.... Well, i have a set of REAL T61 XP discs at home (bought from Lenovo) so i'll compare them when i finally do get home. These are "for emergency use only", I'm going to clone my T61 onto a Hitachi TravelStar 500GB.

Is there anything that the chicoms don't knock off??? you'd think that with Lenovo being in China, they'd try to stop this nonsense.

Lenovo has been aware of that site as far back as October 2008. In June 2010, a Lenovo representative had stated that the Legal department was looking into the issue and that thinkpad~recovery~cds.com was NOT a recognized provider of recovery media. It just may have taken all this time for the wheels of the legal system to find and run over that site.

edit: Of course no sooner do I say this, I find the site is back online .