X60s Rescue and Recovery problem

[atlacatl]

I bought a new hard drive for my X60s and I'm having problems installing the factory image.

Has anyone had any issue with Rescue and Recovery? It stops with an error message: "Error During Initialization." That's all it says.

The hard drive is a Hitachi 7200/16 MB 2.5" Mobile SATA. My laptop, as I said, is a ThinkPad X60s.

Are there any compatibility issues that you guys know with this drives? I searched for a bit, but couldn't find anything.

Thanks.

[ryengineer]

1. Perform a low level format on your HDD.

See the below thread and post.

RnR 3.1 Unable to restore to factory sett. from Hidd. Partit.

Hard drive utility links

2. If the above doesn't solve your issue then try to restore your machine from another set of Product Recovery disks.

[atlacatl]

Thanks for your suggestion ryengineer.

However, I haven't been able to install the default image in my new drive. At this point, I think it's the Recovery CDs I created: the first CD may be corrupted. I already ordered a new set from Lenovo.

I didn't think it would be this hard. I upgraded my T40p with a new hard drive and had no problems at all.

For the record, when I view the boot partition of the drive, I get a "corrupted address" string in there somewhere. This is after I tried running the recovery CD.

The steps I follow:
1. Set "Desktop security" to disabled.
2. Set SATA mode to "compatible."
3. Low Level format the drive (with Hitachi's Diagnostic tool).
4. Set "Desktop security" to "normal."
5. Reboot with Rescue and Recovery CD. I get the error message.
6. Look at the boot table of the drive, and I get the same "corrupted address" string.

I also tried to partition and format the drive manually, but none of the tools I use see the drive. I ran all the tests on the drive, and everything is OK.

I'm using http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/. Great set of tools, but none of the tools to format or partition a disk work with my drive.

I'll try again with the new set of R&R CDs. If that doesn't work, I'm guessing it's the drive that is DOA.

Any thoughts on compatibility? BIOS version? I'm running BIOS version 1.10.

Thanks.

BTW, are the R&R iso images on the Lonovo support site? I read around that version 3 may work.

[ryengineer]

Yes, definitely upgrade your BIOS, many newer versions of firmware have been released after v1.10. The latest is v2.14:

BIOS update utility - ThinkPad X60, X60s.

snip....BTW, are the R&R iso images on the Lonovo support site? I read around that version 3 may work......snip

There are iso images available (fixes, BIOS etc.) but not for this purpose.

[atlacatl]

A quick update on my R&R and new hard drive problem.

I tried a clean install from an XP CD I had laying around and this worked. I couldn't wait 4 days for the new CDs to arrive.

So, it ended up being the R&R CDs that were corrupted, as the new XP install partitioned and formatted my drive without a problem. I was afraid it was a bad drive.

As per the new hardware, I would definitely recommend the upgrade: my machine runs cooler (from 57C to 41 C--it's quite amazing) and the drive seems to run quieter. I can't say anything about power consumption, as my battery doesn't hold more than 25% charge now. In terms of performance, you can see the difference.

Good luck to anyone using corrupted R&R CDs. My hard drive upgrade ended being more painful than it should have been.

UPDATE: my CPU is not running cool anymore. It's back to its usual 57-60 degrees. This happened after I installed all the typical background running processes: virus scanner, db servers, etc.