Thinkpads Forum

I purchased my T60P a few months back, and have used it daily. The previous owner wiped the hard drive, and did a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate 32.

Is it still possible to make recovery discs?

Thanks in advance,

taichi

taichi wrote:The previous owner wiped the hard drive

Nope.

So is it possible to purchase T60P 2623 DDU recovery discs?

taichi

I notice that there are several variants of the recovery discs, differentiated by the following example format: IBM FRU P/N 43T8618. Since this is not the serial number, where do I find this? I'm not able to look at the bottom of my ThinkPad at this moment.

Thanks

taichi

XP-Pro for 2623-DDx: English, U.S. 42J6269 as found in the HMM.
I find it's pot luck with recovery disks as far as part numbers are concerned...
My own (official) set of 7 CDs with XP-Pro/SP2 for T60 and T60p from Lenovo has FRU 43T8618, which is what this shop sells.
Should be OK.

PS: I just saw a cheaper supplier: http://restorecd4u.com/product_info.php ... cts_id=136

I hope this isn't a dumb question, taichi, but have you confirmed that the recovery partition of the T60P was also formatted by the previous owner? Does anything happen if you press the "ThinkVantage" key during boot?

Thanks, RealBlackStuff for the link. The recovery disk available has the number 43T8618 XPP, which they are generically selling for what looks like the whole T60P series. Do you think that's okay? The price is certainly better. If I would have to use the recovery disk, and my current system is Vista, would I lose all of my data?

And BeeJayEmm, I don't think that's a bad question at all. Truthfully, I don't know the answer. If I push the ThinkVantage button during boot, what should I expect to see? I want to be careful not to trigger any change in my configuration by choosing a wrong option. What's the proper way to back out of the ThinkVantage screen, or boot normally to Windows from there?

Thanks,

taichi

If the recovery partition is intact and you push the ThinkVantage button while the Lenovo splash screen is showing during boot, you will find yourself in the Rescue and Recovery environment. On the left side of the main screen, you will see options including "Restore your system" under the "Rescue and Recovery" heading. Choosing that option would allow you to restore your ThinkPad to factory contents if the recovery partition was not formatted by the previous owner. You can cancel, back out and restart at any point in the process right up until you give the final OK to restore. Note that you will lose all data during this process so have that backed up first. If the partition is not intact, pressing the button will do nothing.

To format the entire hard drive, including the hidden recovery partition, the partition must be made visible in the BIOS setup (which you can access during boot by pressing the F1 key). The previous owner probably knew enough to have done this, so you probably are out of luck. If it wasn't done that way, the recovery partition may still be intact and you could use it to restore the T60 to original factory load. Sorry about the length of this tome.

I know it's probably simple as pie to check for the recovery partition, but as I'm in great dependency on my computer right now I don't want to even get close to a screen that has a button on it that says "restore." I don't have a backup of this system right now.

But I notice that my hundred gigabyte drive reads (size of the C drive) 93.1 GB. Does this possibly indicate the presence of a recovery partition? Would a recovery partition of XP, possibly compressed, take up 6.9 GB?

Thanks for all the good advice.

taichi

taichi wrote:But I notice that my hundred gigabyte drive reads (size of the C drive) 93.1 GB. Does this possibly indicate the presence of a recovery partition?

If the size of your C partition shows as 93.1 GB in Windows, you don't have a recovery partition. Your hard disk's manufacturer measures hard disk space in gigabytes, one gigabyte being 10˄9 bytes. Windows shows hard disk space in gibibytes, where one gibibyte is 2˄30 bytes. Therefore, 100 gigabytes - according to your hard disk manufacturer - are approximately equal to 93.1 gibibytes - according to Windows.

Dear TTY:

Thank you for your erudite answer.

Given that I do not have the recovery partition, what is the best thing to do? I do not have any problems currently with my computer, but I want to be prepared for any eventuality.

taichi

Buy an external HD and take an image of your laptop HD.