Thinkpads Forum

Hey everyone...

I'm a very proud T60 owner and a friend of mine has purchased a new T61. Through no fault of their own, it seems that they need to go down the road of restoring the laptop to it's factory "image" via the boot-->ThinkVantage button.

Are there any good guides on how to do this in the forum or elsewhere? My impression is that it's fairly simple... re-boot, hold down the button, choose the R&R options to kick off the process, then ???? let it complete. Is it that simple or are there any tips & tricks that come along with it?


Thanks in advance.


tDub

Yeah its simple, just press the blue button at the ThinkPad logo, wait a few minutes still it boots, click 'Restore My System', choose the third option to restore factory image, click no to back up any files (i'm assuming), click Finish, another window will pop up basically confirming everything and agreeing to terms for a few window so just click OK to everything, the only real option on this second window is whether you want to perform a full or a custom (choose which additional applications you want installed), if he is not sure of things then i'd choose the Full option.

There are a lot of prompts, mainly so it cant be done by accident but its intuative once you get it started.

How long does the process typically take? When I manually re-install WinXP on my home PC, the process is about 60-90 minutes. Is it approximately the same?


Thanks.

Unfortunately not - can take about 2.5 hours with Vista i think.

There are several versions of the Rescue and Recovery program. If you are rebuilding your system, and you do NOT get prompted to rebuild a factory image or a custom image, I would recommend contacting Lenovo and getting the latest Rescue and Recovery CD. For my T60p that is P/N 43E0845. This version will recreate the ability to do a factory install from just your hard drive. Older versions seem to require you to have a set of back up CDs to reinstall the factory image.