Thinkpads Forum

I've gotten heaps of info from these forums so here's something useful I found out today. It might have been mentioned elsewhere but I've not seen it.

This worked for me. T61 with XP Pro. Assumes your original recovery partition is intact.

Instead of restoring to then make more recovery media as recommended elsewhere on the internet, remove Rescue and Recovery®, reboot, then reinstall. I reinstalled Rescue and Recovery® 4.23.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-76225

No need to disturb your currently running system, so if you are upgrading the hard drive etc. this may be useful.

Good information. Thanks for sharing it.

I also noticed sysprep running in the Command window when I did a test restore, but the sysprep answer file is of course not visible since (I assume) it's buried in the compressed .IMZ files. (There is a GUI tool to run pqideploy.exe but I've not played with it yet.)

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php? ... 2405&st=20

If the recovery dumps a sysprepped image then it would be worth the experiment to image the restored partition BEFORE it boots into Windows for the first time. Then you'd likely have a universal Thinkpad preactivated image. Put that on bootable media and you have a universal recovery DVD (or CD set). For use only on machines with proper COA of course.

"Restore, turn off before reboot, boot imaging utility liveCD of choice, write image to external drive, reboot into Windows, make bootable restore media per imaging utility instructions, restore image to different test machine."

I have to hand the machine I was working on back to the owner and none of my others have Windows (virtual machines excepted), so I've no way to test that for a while. If anyone does, please post results.