Thinkpads Forum

X32 Lenovo Thinkpad.

I am having troubles (bluescreens) and I need to reinstall to factory settings.
Usually there should be a recovery portion on the hard drive but I cant seem to access it.

I am therefore looking for a complete recovery CD to return the laptop to factory setting.

Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Thank you so much.

Toby

Same problem with my (Dec) 2007 T60. I have the R & R CDs, but can't get them loaded without blue screening. Replaced hard drive, still no go. Is there somewhere to download the R & R, or can I load mine onto a USB thumbdrive and boot from it?

No place to download the recovery CD's. You might be able to still buy them from Lenovo, but probably not. XP is a bit long in the tooth and soon will no longer be supported by Microsoft (come April 2014).

Either get a windows XP retail install disc or go for Windows 7. I would recommend Windows 7 as it will continue to get security updates for some time yet.

You might consider installing Linux instead of Windows on that older machine. You can do almost anything with Linux that you can with Windows. Of course there is some Windows software that will not run properly in Linux, and some printers are not well supported in Linux. But really, Linux has come a long way and generally supports most hardware. Mageia 3 KDE is the most Windows-like version of Linux that I have tried. There are other versions that aren't as easy to use, but do run faster on older hardware. A distro that runs XFCE would be a good choice IMO for faster running desktop.

@2007T60:

Since you have already replaced the hard drive, you might want to try running a memory diagnostic on the system before doing anything else. Download a free copy of memtet86+ from here:

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

It's available in various bootable forms. Allow it to run at least three complete passes through all of the patterns; probably will take an hour or two depending upon how much memory is installed. If you don't get any errors (quite obvious if the program hangs or spits some text in the lower half of the screen with a red background) then the issue may be with the motherboard, optical drive or media.

GomJabbar wrote:Either get a windows XP retail install disc or go for Windows 7. I would recommend Windows 7 as it will continue to get security updates for some time yet.

Because there is no proper driver for the ATI Radeon, Windows 7 is likely to never work flawlessly on this machine. I've wrestled it for a long time, and it works, but: multi-monitor support is diffuclt (Win+P and Presentation Director don't work; you have to set everything manually), and it experiences various glitches/freezes when changing power states.

Battery life is worse than with XP, too.

Maybe there are other people that have been more successful than me. I'd be happy to learn some more tricks to get it to work.

Some Linux distro as you suggested may be a better option if you fear XP becoming suddenly very vulnerable (though personally I believe these fears are unfounded).