Thinkpads Forum

HELP.

A colleague of mines T60p XP machine went off for a video repair after we had removed the SATA harddrive.

While the laptop was away for repair its harddrive was plugged in to a desktop XP machine to acess the files that were on the drive, not as the c: drive but just as a data drive. Some time in this week the desktop machine ran checkdisk on the T60p's drive.

When the laptop returned we put the hard drive back in and it failed to boot...... the Thinkvantage button gets us in to R&R, can this help?

We have a Lenovo full CD set of recovery CD's

We have new unused XP discs and licenses

The data and config is still on the hard drive, how can we recover without having to do a full reinstall of all his programs?

Can you describe the boot failure? Blinking cursor, any error message, etc.

Brad

Hi,
I have Vista but here is something that might also apply to XP: in similiar situations I boot from Vista DVD and let it repair Vista startup. I don´t know if you have such repair options with XP CDs, but repairing the XP installation might indeed help in your case. However, there is a chance that some of your apps get broken during the repair, so you´ll have to reinstall them. Also note that all recent updates will be gone, so you´ll have to go through the update process again.
I guess the other machine has probabely modified the the boot settings (I think that´s called MBR) of your XP install due to CHKDSK. AFAIK there are also some live DVDs that would allow you to modify bootup settings in the master boot record (inlc. bootloader or bootmanager or whatever this thing is called). You may try google for these.
Hope this helps somehow!

Good luck

Marin

Hi Marin85, Thanks for your suggestion.

We tried the repair option on an XP recovery disc but no matter what we did the machine would boot but the Windows Setup application on the CD could not see the SATA hard drive, whether we selected REPAIR or NEW INSTALL.

If we boot using an Acronis Disk Director boot disk we can see the SATA disc and all its files are OK.

If we try and boot correctly from the SATA drive, the machine boots and starts windows with the normal XP splash screen. After a little while (30 seconds?) it then blue screens.

Any ideas?

In the BIOS set SATA mode to the other setting.

Brad

Great stuff Brad, that did the trick.

Now we are getting on with the XP repair.

Thanks