Thinkpads Forum

Following on the tails of this thread, I received brand spankin' new R&R and Product Recovery CDs from IBM/Lenovo (THANK YOU, Atlanta call center rep!). The previous problem was that locally made R&R discs started up, flashed "Setup is examing your hardware configuration..." then go black and stop. The same behavior in a model 200793U T60P occurs with the Lenovo R&R CD. This was in a system which had been wiped and RHEL5 installed.

So I tried the discs in a T60 200763U which had Fedora 8 installed. Same behavior! The R&R CD starts up, flashes the message, then just stops.

On both systems, I reset the BIOS to the default configuration. What I presume is that the R&R CD does not need the original R&R partition on the HDD, but will write a new one which it will boot from after the first reboot. Am I wrong? Is there something Lenovo put on the T60s which prevent recover if another OS is installed? (I know that sounds paranoid. I really do.)

I've used the recovery disks on an empty drive so no I don't think so. Have you tried to format the drive before the reinstall?

Solved.

With information from here and here, I determined that Linux often writes an ext2 or ext3 type partition, one which R&R can't read and then halts. After manually creating a vfat partition on the main HDD (/dev/sda1 or similar), and rebooting, I found the R&R discs now boot normally and can write the new Predesktop partition.

Details will vary depending on what you have available, but for my purpose, I used a Fedora 9 live CD on a 2GB USB flash drive. I mounted the drive and created a new empty DOS partition on it with /sbin/fdisk, then unmounted to convert it to vfat with mkdosfs. Rebooted with the Rescue Disc in, and the Recovery workspace booted normally.