Thinkpads Forum

Why does Lenovo make it so freakishly difficult to simply run CHKDSK on your hard drive?

Something got clobbered in my boot filesystem. I found this out when I rebooted after de-installing AVG Antivirus, and got a boot error that \Windows\System32\Drivers\PCI.SYS could not be found or was corrupted.

My first effort was to check R&R to see if there was a Windows XP install image in the pre-desktop area that might let me get to the recovery console.

Nope. No way to even reinstall the factory image from R&R.

So I fired up Acronis from its boot CD, and attempted to restore the missing files. Couldn't do that because of directory corruption (I guess).

Getting a bit panicky, now, I downloaded a Windows XP Pro ISO, burned it, and booted off of that. Wouldn't recognize the hard drive.

Switched the SATA mode to "Compatibility" in the BIOS, rebooted off the XP Pro CD, and was able to get to the recovery console.

Ran CHKDSK; it found and fixed some errors.

Reconfigured SATA mode to whatever the alternative to "Compatibility" is

And the laptop is now bootable.

Lesson learned . . . always get the installation media.

*sigh*

Lesson learned . . . always get the installation media.

After getting a new machine up and running I usually burn the recovery CD's, step two.

Yes, recovery media is always very important to have, but many times one can save a lot of time and hassle if the system can be repaired with an installation disk that matches the OS one is running, rather than completely replacing and reinstalling the OS with recovery media.

Installation disks are very useful recovery and repair tools for certain problems because with one, many times a system can be repaired rather than completely overwritten by recovery disks.

I think it is a crime that laptops, including Thinkpads, don't ship with an installation disk for whatever OS the laptop comes installed with and that the customer has paid for. At least there should be an easy way to create one just like there is for recovery media.

Fortunately it is possible to find OS installation images on the net. I recently downloaded an installation disk for Vista that had SP1 slipstreamed and it has already come in handy on a couple of occasions.