Thinkpads Forum

I have a Lenovo 3000 N100 (0768-A53), and I was having some file corruption issues, and I couldn't seem to schedule a chkdsk upon reboot within Vista no matter what I tried. Once I removed the SATA hard drive (connecting it a different laptop via a USB SATA adapter obtained from Ebay for $10 shipped) and did a chkdsk using a different laptop, it fixed those hard disk file errors.

However, a couple of thoughts:

1. As I initially tried to do a full system recovery using the DISK (note the singular term), that created in "Create Recovery Media" under Lenovo Care, it would get into R&R v4 but once I clicked all the way through to get it to do a full factory recovery, it would just hang (mouse was repsonsive, but no hard drive activity was noted over the course of 2 hours, so I restarted the computer, which booted up into Vista like nothing ever happened). Seemingly, unlike it's Thinkpad brethren, here is no such option for making recovery disks, just the single "Rescue and Recovery Startup Disk." The ThinkVantage folder is empty. Nontheless, I realized that no matter what I did, without any full recovery media disk sets, I was not going to be abel to do a reinstall of Vista. I even tried running Rescue and Recovery within Windows and it wouldn't do anything.

Question 1: Does anyone have a rescue and recovery media set for this N100 laptop (running Vista Home Premium)? I just need the disks, I have the key code on teh bottom of my laptop?

Question 2: Has anyone successfully restored their Lenovo N100 laptop to a factory-fresh condition, and if so, how did you do this?

Ideally, getting a copy of the rescue and recovery media set (I'm guesing 5-6 disks) would be the best option (I'm more than happy to pay for this). Of course, if the media set was included with the laptop, I wouldn't be here... However, your help is greatly appreciated.

I had similar problems. My N100 0768 A52 started acting up and ended up not able to boot. It would just go to a flashing cursor right after POST. I tried the recovery disk's (3 DVD's) that I made from the create backup media option and they were corrupted is some way. I ended up managing to get the system back up and running however lost the ability to interrupt startup and get to the pre-desktop. After trying to reinstall R&R 4 which would give an install error (something about installing the boot manager) and the R&R boot sector repair utility, I ended up calling Lenovo. Without much hassle they sent me a full set of reload disk. When the disk arrived I loaded the system, but after a few reboots the system would eventually end up back to the blinking cursor. During this whole time I keep trying to schedule a scandisk at startup but it would never run. Long story short I had to totally erase the disk with a utility on the Ultimate Boot CD and then reload the preload from the Lenovo DVD's. I think the MBR was corrupted and only a rebuild from scratch would fix it.