Thinkpads Forum

I'm in the process of switching over my hard drive and so I need to burn the recovery discs on my new T61. However when going through the wizard it doesn't say if you need CD or DVD and for which discs it's burning. It justs says 'insert disc' could somebody please tell me how many discs I need and what types in which order?

Thank-you.

3 discs, although the first CAN be a CD-R since the setup recovery image burned on it is small (229MB). The latter two product recovery discs are 4.36GB and 0.99GB respectively as DVDs. (at least on my T61)

The retail set from Lenovo has a 4th Vista disc too.

I've just put my new hard drive in, booted up with the recovery DVDs I made earlier. Put in Disc 1 as instructed and was told it is not the correct disk. I think it's looking for the 'operating system recovery disc' as the installation wizard is telling me... are those not created during the Rescue Media Creation process?

Thanks.

Edit: Recovery went ahead anyway and it's now booting up properly, my new drive properly set up and everything. Thanks for your help.

I had the same issue - created the recovery media (I burnt them onto 3 DVDs). When I went to restore from them, it asked to install a particular disc (can't quite recall what it asked for). I tried all three discs, and it wouldn't accept them.

There was an option to cancel or skip that disc - everything went smoothly and the system did restore. I did find a post somewhere when I googled the name of the disc the recovery process requested - apparently that is a completely different type of restore disc, which isn't created by the user.

Lenovo have made it a bit confusing for us, and should reword the text to say something like "if you do have the optional system disc, insert it now, or else insert the user-created backup disc XX to continue with normal restore process".

Has anyone tried to create the recovery disc in 1 usb stick? Now that 8gb stick is selling for like $15 or so, it would be like to have the startup disk and product recovery disc all in 1 usb stick.

Not sure if it can be done to be honest. There wasn't any option to do that in the setup. I would have done it otherwise.

Thanks for your comments pksw, nice to see that somebody else finds the recovery disc creation process peculiar.

It might be possible to force the recovery process to use a virtual drive (Nero/MagicISO/PowerISO) and create mountable images. Then again, if that worked for recovery, you could just copy the discs to USB sticks after burning them.