Thinkpads Forum

my 320 hd crashed, slowly following a series of errors saying rundll32.exe and scvhost.exe missing. I did have the previous 100 gig drive that I slapped back in and have limped along since. but I'd like to fix the 320 drive if I can.

For a while I was getting xp to fire up, but it would freeze and then crash to blue screen. I tried restore points, but all old ones prior to a couple of days were wiped for some reason? A bug maybe? Thinkvantage button is non-functional now too. So I assume I have to go after xp repair.

I have recovery disks, and extrenal cd, but I also have an old unused XP Pro install disk I could use to repair it to avoid wiping my existing data and system.

my question is can I use this XP Pro install instead of my native recovery disks to possibly repair XP? Even though it is not for laptop or ibm specifically? And if I use it, can I reuse it on another computer later to repair or install.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Do you have the operation system separated from the data or is all mixed up on the same partition (C:\)?

If it is all mixed up, you can try a repair and I wish you good luck with that (won't work in most cases and if it does it won't work for long.).
If you wanna do it the right way then boot your machine by a Linux Live CD and backup your data on a external drive. After that you can wipe out your drive and partition it with at least 2 partitions for os (C:\) and data (D:\). Install the operation system from scratch! And finally transfer your data.
At this point it is a good idea to make a disk image from the os partition with some tool like -> Acronis® True Image Home 2009

If you have the os and your data separated, then just format the os partition and install from scratch!

If you have an image of the os partition then just overwrite the os partition by the image and you are up and running in 15 min.

Good luck.
If you need more help -> Google is your best friend in these situations!

In putting the old drive on external, I can't see any separate partition for the 17gb IBM thinkvantage system restore, but I'm not sure how or where I would see it? When I go to my computer and use properties to see the whole 320gb as one. i assume the two partitions would show up as different.