Thinkpads Forum

Hi; I want to do a repair installation of Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 on my Thinkpad X60 tablet, and was wondering if anyone had any experience, tips, or caveats.

I'm doing the repair because of some kooky things acting up, like Diskeeper and autochk not being able to grab the main partition for exclusive access at startup, and a disturbing rate of accumulation of file system errors as reported by chkdsk. I'm pretty sure the hardware is okay - I've been running diagnostics and stress tests without any detected problems (SpinRite, MemTest86, HDTune, Prime95, etc.).

I have two sets of disks - one is a normal copy of XP Tablet Edition (from the MSDN Academic Alliance), and the other is the recovery disks made by the ThinkVantage utility. (I'm not really sure there's a repair option in the ThinkVantage disks; I don't have them with me at the moment...) I'd rather use the normal XP Tablet disks, as they're the ones I have at the moment.

I've upgraded to Rescue and Recovery 4 and Client Security Solution 8, so I'm nervous about using the ThinkVantage recovery disks in case they clobber the existing installations, settings, and/or my backups. I have backups of my data (from R&R) both on this hard drive and on a network drive.

So, which set of disks should I repair from, and are there any things to watch out for?

The RR disks do nt have a repair feature unfortunately. With that said, they will restore your computer to new condition, but if your RR software was updated, it will restore the RR version that came with your computer. You can update, but then, um... I am VERY hesistant to recommend this route.

What I would do is copy all your RR backups to an external USB drive. Then attempt a windows repair, and test out your machine for any further leaks. IF it works, youre good, IF NOT, then I would format the HDD, run a full check disk on the hdd from another hdd, then do a complete RR recovery of your computer.

Immediately after it is installed, do another RR backup to your machine and a USB hdd. Follow my post here to restore your original data off the first usb hdd http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight= . Restore only your data as the windows stuff is probably corrupted. You will lose settings, but at least you will have your data intact.