Thinkpads Forum

My T60 finally sold so I wiped the hard drive with iolo DriveScrubber from Best Buy. 7 pass. Now not sure what to do next. I selected factory new specs with the Restore and Recovery discs but without the expected results. Restart won't boot into XP, just keeps me in Thinkvantage Technology and looks like it wants me to 'recover' with the 7 discs again. I'm obviously a tech newbie here with just enough confidence to get me into trouble. Happens all the time! I probably scrubbed the restore partition away but figured the restore discs would put it back on. Yes? No? Do I need to partition or format before running Restore? After running Restore? I want to ship this thing today if possible so I welcome any and all comments or suggestions. Thanks

Fooled with it some more and got a notice that the hard drive is not installed. OK. I restarted and pressed f1 into bios. Changed sata drive to 'compatible' (!?!) , selected unspecified partition, the one everything used to be on, and am now formatting it ntfs. waiting...waiting. Hope I'm on the right track. Looks like the security partition might still be there, too. Format is now finished and windows is loading. Yea! So far, so good. If anyone has comments on my progress I'd really appreciate it. Don't want to make things worse.

Dang. Now when I boot into windows I get three operating system options to choose from. Two windows XP pro and one unspecified os on drive C. I can choose any one of them and I get windows xp to open. I'm ready to throw myself off a bridge.

I won't claim to know what's going on here. But I think the recovery CD set will create the hidden partition and install the R&R software, after that you can boot without the CD into R&R, and run system restore from there. That will format the new partition and install Windows. At least that's how I remember it from older Thinkpads I've set up.

And, yes, it's a good idea to zero out the entire drive before you start the process.

You have to "Restore Factory Contents" twice.

The first time is after booting the first recovery disc, then all the software from all the discs is copied to your hard drive. When you boot the hard drive into Rescue and Recovery, you have to "Restore Factory Contents" again. This time, Windows and the IBM/Lenovo software will be installed. You will go through several reboots.

THANKS Neil and Comjabber, Once it was able to boot with the xp disc I could restart with the R&R discs. Lots of boots and nearly 5 hours later I had my thinkpad back in factory new config. I was still able to pack it up and get it to UPS in time to go out to it's new owner today. Whew! I really liked that Thinkpad when it didn't need messing with but I've come to believe that I will never know enough about Windows operating systems to stay out of trouble. My brand new MacBookPro arrives today. I'm giddy.

Bill Morrow and members...thank you so much for this excellent resource.