Thinkpads Forum

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This is the fourth time. The Recovery Disks for my system manage everything well up creating the partitions from which to recover, but when actually using the RnR to recover the system to factory settings it would stop at about 25% of the process, saying that it is unable to continue.

Steps:

1.Blank Drive. Erased. Tabula Rasa.

2. Boot CD & Recovery Disks create the Predesktop Area and Hidden Service Partition.

3. Recovery Process Halted unsolvably.

It seems to me that I have to install a fresh system, erasing beforehand EVERYTHING, install RnR fresh, create manually a hidden partition for service, backup personally my system there, and live (half?) happily ever after....

Are there any hopes of doing this better? Or not doing this and make the disks actually work?

(I am writing this from The Recovery Console Opera... ':roll:'
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See if the information in the following thread is of any help.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=38582

Thanks for the tip. I am on it and hope the low level format does the trick.

Edit - some 2hrs later. Thanks again, that thread has been insightful. I have lowformatted the drive and even the predesktop area and then enabled it, and afterwards proceeded to the restore with the 7 disks.

However in my case I believe that there is something fishy...at a certain .imd/ .imz - the 3GFRO0A0.imz to be precise - the extraction from the hidden partition fails in the final stage of recovery - It gives the "Product Recovery failed to restore your system" message.

And this has happened at exactly the same place every time. I give up. Perhaps it is best to send it to service but I hate to waste money AND TiME this way. And seemingly I will care about it myself. Huff.

I my mothertongue there is a saying: One shouldn't go with a sack at the tree that boasts/is praised. Morale: There wouldn't be fruit left for you. There are few advantages left from RnR for me so far... Save for black humour I wouldn't know how to express my frustration...however, this is becoming routine.

When doing the low level format, the security for the Predesktop Area should be set to Disabled. When restoring with the Product Recovery Discs, the security for the Predesktop Area should be set to Normal.

One other thought. Did you have your hard drive setting in the BIOS set to Compatibility Mode or ACHI? I believe it should be set to Compatibility Mode.

In the following thread, one user discovered that the version of the boot CD made a difference on Restore Factory Contents being successful. http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=49127

If none of the above are any help, you should contact Lenovo and explain that your Product Recovery Discs failed to work. They have been known to send out a set under those circumstances. Others have found defective product recovery discs before. I believe jdhurst reported having this experience.

Goodie! It's good to know, that I am not the first nor the last mohican with the defective disks, and that other have gone through the pains...


The Predesktop management, disabled, erase, enable, recover, I've done by the book.But I really don't remember when I had the Compatibility and when I had the AHCI on, I swithed between them several times during the trials (and errors ). My intuitive memory says that I've tried even that but I am not sure yet. I will do that. But before that I am going to make a custom backup image of the OS and software installed, save that somewhere and then retry.

Also do you think that this option (Enablement of Factory Recovery in Pre-Desktop environment and Creation of Recovery CD in the Windows environment )
from Rescue and Recovery 4.1 for Windows 2000 and XP - Large Enterprise individual language files

could do the (a) trick?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-68262

I might also try that if it doesn't work, by trying to pinch the service partition with that enablement application after reinstalling a OS...

Thanks for the valuable input and for the great help.