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T60 ThinkVantage button not working after new Win XP install

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 10:26 pm
by wpwood3
I did a fresh install of Win XP and reloaded all my drivers. Everything works fine except the ThinkVantage button no longer works.

I suspect the MBR has been overwritten. I have done some searching here and on the IBM website and it seems that mbr32.exe should be able to fix my problem but, after trying several things I am still no closer to a solution.

The hidden partition is still on the drive but there's no way to boot into the predesktop environment.

Any clues?

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:34 am
by safelder
Have you loaded the hotkey drivers? I'm fairly certain that's what controls the ThinkVantage button.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:55 am
by archer6
My ThinkVantage button no longer works. Same situation, so I'm looking for a solution as well

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 11:41 am
by wpwood3
I got the ThinkVantage button working by using the brute force method.
Basically, I backed up my new clean XP partition then I restored the entire hard drive to factory specs then I restored the new partition.

Everything works fine now but there must be an easier way. The ThinkVantage button itself would always interrupt the boot process but it would give you the options of selecting Esc, F1, F11, etc rather than taking me to the predesktop environment. That's why I think it was a MBR issue and not a key mapping issue.

I need to learn more about the workings of the predesktop.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 12:43 pm
by bg4533
I just reinstalled Windows and everything is working right so far except the sound card and the ThinkVantage button. People have posted fixes for the sound card so I should be able to get that taken care of. In Windows my ThinkVantage button does nothing. Is there anyway to map it to perform any function I want? I would like to make it lock the computer or hibernate.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:20 pm
by ScotchDiver
Download and install the "Hotkey Utility" under the "Utilities" section. This is available from Drivers & Software download on IBM's site.

Sound card

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 2:21 pm
by wpwood3
bg4533 wrote:I just reinstalled Windows and everything is working right so far except the sound card and the ThinkVantage button. People have posted fixes for the sound card so I should be able to get that taken care of.
To get the Sound Card working you first have to install the "Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) High Definition Audio class driver".
It is in C:\DRIVERS\OTHER3. You should see an "unknown PCI device" in device manager that is looking for this driver.
Then you can install your sound card and modem.