Driver disaster and rescue and recover advice

[bmac]

Hi everyone,

A couple of days ago I allowed System Update to upgrade a bunch of drivers on my T60, including the ethernet and wireless drivers and Access connections. The net result was that no networking works any more; wireless doesn't see any networks, wired doesn't connect. Windows system restore won't go back to any previous states. I tried manually installing copies of the drivers through Windows and/or uninstalling them and that won't work either - it hangs part way through the process. I'm moderately doomed; Rescue and Recovery seems the next logical step.

I have a multipart part question, then. Part (A) is curiosity - anyone had anything similar happen to them lately? Is there something wrong with the new drivers, or am I just unlucky?

(B) Any advice for the R&R procedure? I have a R&R backup on my harddrive from about 6 months ago. My preference would be to go back to that and chose the option for just restoring the OS, in hopes I can keep documents (though they're all copied off onto an external drive) and applications, but (B1) should I just bite the bullet and roll back completely to the old backup, or (B2) go all the way back to factory install?

(C) Is it generally better to run R&R out of the preboot mode, or for this purpose should it work fine started out of Windows?

thanks for any advice or comments.

Bruce
previously-happy T60 owner

[egibbs]

I have had Access Connections updates cause all kinds of problems with networking. Can you uninstall Access Connections if you have it? You may not be able to - it sometimes won't uninstall. You can manually uinstall it if you are comfortable searching the registry for keys and deleting them.

Make sure you have good backups of anything you want on an external drive beofre mucking with R&R - R&R is notorious for blowing up in the middle of a recovery and leaving an unreadable disk. It's gotten much better lately though.

I would first try the option to restore only system files. This has worked for me on several occasions, and is quick and painless.

It doesn't really matter whether you start from Windows or the recovery partition, because if you start from Windows it will reboot and come up in the predesktop mode. If the machine is off when you start it is quicker to go right to the predesktop. If it's in Windows it's your choice.

Ed Gibbs