Thinkpads Forum

Has anyone successfully installed a Vista Ultimate 32-bit service/recovery partition using self-made recovery media? Has anyone encountered any of the issues I describe below and found solutions to them?

I decided to install a new Hitachi 7k200 200GB hard drive into my T61p (8891CTO). I hadn't done much yet with the Vista installation on my factory hard drive so I wasn't concerned about preserving it. However, since I figured I will never use the factory hard drive in my T61 again, I thought it wise to copy over the service partition. Who knows, maybe eventually I will decided to pass my laptop along to someone else and want to reroll the Vista installation.

With this objective in mind, using the Vista installation on the factory hard drive, I used the "Create Recovery Media" menu option in Vista to burn a set of DVDs, 3 disks in total. I then took out the factory hard drive and installed my new hard drive. Using the recovery media I just created, I let the computer run through the entire recovery process. In the end, I had a service/recovery partition and a Vista partition on my new hard drive. I could boot into Vista and use it normally, but if I tried to boot into the service parition using the ThinkVantage button or F11 key, I would always get the error "BOOTMGR is missing". Just in case there had ben a fluke in the recovery process, I repeated the process to see if the outcome would change. It did not.

Based on advice I found in this and other forums, I tried upgrading to a newer version of the Rescue and Recovery software in Vista and burning another set of recovery media. Using this second set of media for the recovery process resulted in the same outcome.

Upon further investigation, I discovered the reason I was receiving the "BOOTMGR is missing" error message was the Vista "\BOOT" directory and all of its contents were missing from the newly created service partition. (The service partition is really just an NTFS partition with a different type marked in the partition table. I was able to twiddle the partition type, mount it, and inspect it.) This was pretty concerning since it seemed like the recovery process went very wrong, yet there was no indication of any errors during the recovery process itself.

As an alternate approach, I used various utilities to clone the service parition from my factory drive to my new drive directly. I also was careful to clone the first 1MB of the hard drive preceeding the service partition that contains the MBR. This approach nearly worked, in that I could boot from the service partition and use most of the tools. However, when trying to run the recovery procees, I would always get an error to the effect of "%s cannot be installed". This is still sort of perplexing since I can run the recovery process on my factory hard drive without issue and both should have had identical content.

After all of this, I finally gave up and contacted Lenovo for guidance. They sent me a set of recovery DVDs that work just fine. My only complaint/concern is that the DVDs they sent me were dated from January 2007 (Part Number 43T8088) and create a 6.42GB service partition with Rescue and Recovery v4.00.1117 while my factory hard drive has a 6.50GB service partition with Rescue and Recovery v4.10.1315. I'm perplexed why they sent me these old DVDs unless they are just trying to clear stock or the technical support person just didn't order to most recent part number. Is it worth trying to get a newer set of DVDs before I setup Vista and can't easily reburn?

Here are a few other things I discovered during my experiments:

- Installing a new version of Rescue and Recovery in Windows does not seem to affect the version installed in the service partition. Now that I have R&R v4.00.1117 running in the service partition, I have not found any way to upgrade it.

- Installing a new version of Rescue and Recovery in Windows does not seem to affect the content of self-made recovery media. I compared the media created with the original version of R&R that came with my computer vs. the upgrade I installed (i.e. the first and second set of recovery media I described above) and the disks were exactly the same.

- As a final test, after all of the above I used the service partition created by the Lenovo provided recovery media to reinstall Vista, upgraded to Rescue and Recovery v4.2, and created a third set of recovery media. I then used this recovery media to reburn my new hard drive. I had the exact same outcome I originally experienced of the "BOOTMGR is missing" error.

Through further exploration I was able to answer some of my own questions. For the benefit of anyone who might run across this later, I thought I'd share my findings.

- When using my cloned service partition to restore the system, the actual error messages that I received was "%s failed to restore your system." However, I found that this can be reproduced simply by deleting all other partitions on my factory hard drive other than the service partition. Apparently there is a defect in the recovery process when executed from the service partition where it expects at least one other partition to already exist. This can be worked around simply be creating an extra partition after the service partition, which doesn't necessarily even need to be formatted. It gets removed during the recovery process anyway.

- I'm not sure it is relevant to any of the problems I experienced, but I did notice the ThinkPad's internal drive bay and my external USB SATA enclosure are using different translation schemas in Windows. The ThinkPad uses 240 heads while the USB enclosure uses 255 heads. I don't expect this will cause any problems if you are doing a byte-for-byte copy. I imagine it could cause problems though if your cloning software tries to realign the partitions or you create partitions with one translation and then expect it to work with the other.

So, for me this leaves the following questions open:

- Why is every set of recovery media that I create unable to install a bootable service partition? Is this a general problem with the Rescue and Recovery process, or possibly a problem limited to the Vista Ultimate 32-bit self-made recovery media? Is anyone else experiencing these problems?

- Is there a way to upgrade the service partition version using the Rescue and Recovery updates Lenovo publishes on-line, or is the only way to order a new set of factory recovery media?

Hey ccooper!

I arrived at the same problem, though, through a different way. I just got a new Lenovo Thinkpad x61s and wanted to dual boot it with Vista and Linux. I went straight away, without creating any Product Recovery Disks and without searching thoroughly the net about possible problems. The result was to end up with a nice dual boot system, but unfortunately with Grub (the Linux boot loader) overriding the MBR. This made the blue ThinkVantage key unusable. For some reasons however I wanted it to be functional. So I started manipulating the system to bring it back to the factory stage. During this process, I needed to do different thinks i.e. fixing the MBR, restoring Grub and many-many more. To make a long story short, I created a Rescue and Recovery (v 4.2) cd and managed to boot back into Vista. Immediately I created the Product Recovery Disks (1cd + 1 dvd) which was the first thing I shoulf have done. So I used these two media to restore the system back to its factory settings. Everything was ok except that the ThinkVantage key would give me the same "BOOTMGR is missing" error. I tried again to restore MBR but without any success. According to Lenovo, this was caused by the fact that the Product Recovery Disks were created by Rescue and Recovery 4.2 while my original system was shipped with Rescue and Recovery 3.0. So downloading and installing version 4.2 on my recovered system made the ThinkVantage key functional again.

NOTE: While upgrading the Rescue and Recovery software on my newly recovered system, I downloaded initially the (English) Rescue and Recovery 4.2 for Windows Vista version since I am running an English version of Vista. But this version was not working. I was getting (if I remember correctly) a “wrong tvt file” error (or something similar). Then I thought to try out the Greek version, since I bought this computer in Greece. Surprisingly, this version worked. So now Everything is as when I got the computer from the factory. Next I will try to dual boot again but by putting Grub into its own partition.

Hope this helps.

I have experienced the same problem with the Vista recovery media. The recovery partition is not bootable after a factory recovery. My solution is to install RnR as soon as the recovery is completed. RnR updates the recovery partition and makes it bootable via the ThinkVantage button.

I don't have this problem with XP recovery media, for what it's worth.