Z565 - picked one up...had questions

[joester]

I picked one up today that has an issue...
Won't start normally into windows, reboots and offers recovery or start normally.
Choose recovery, the progress bar stops 1/3 of the way across the screen, then it reboots and offers the same menu.
I tried the One Touch Recovery and it boots into a wallpaper type windows screen and the pointer moves around, but no options or icons available.
Reboot, and I'm back to the recovery/start normal screen so I'll assume I will need recovery disks (which I don't currently have).

I also noticed that for a 2 year old product, there is only one post on the forum announcing it's product release...did I inherit the proverbial red-headed step-child?

Joe

[joester]

After some investigation, I found an article on the One Touch Recovery and some issues it had.
After downloading a new recovery file for the one-touch and a slight BIOS modification I was able to boot the recovery off a USB drive and restore the system to factory original.

Any other Z565 owners out there?

[joester]

Wow. A whole year later and no response. I guess not too many were sold or I'm just the only Z565 owner on the forum.

[Majestic]

For connecting with other IdeaPad owners of your model you would probably get a better response over at Lenovo's forum.
This forum is more geared for the ThinkPad product line.

https://forums.lenovo.com

[aPanzerIV]

Hey, my sister had a Z565 that got clobbered by a virus. The bootup recovery never worked out of the box and we didn't make disks, so we were screwed.

If you have a windows install on there I would try to get it working to burn disks, if there is a password on it there are some tools that (I won't mention their names) that you can use to bypass them. If it doesn't boot you can try a few other things (also google them).

Otherwise I'd run seatools to make sure the drive is still good, and then do a clean install of windows.


Edit: Actually I remember having a similar situation with a Thinkpad Edge E420.

Get a external drive carrier and put the drive in it.

Hook it up to a working computer with lotsa hard drive space, find the recovery partition and copy EVERYTHING off of it (preferable you use Aomei and a third hard drive that is completely empty and sacraficial).

Now you have 2 options, either could work or not work:

A. Put the empty sacrificial drive into the Z565 to see if it will boot the recovery partition.

B. Extract all of the contents of the recovery partition (30-40Gb), and copy the C drive contents over to the origional drive after wiping it. Then boot your new screwed up windows install, create recovery disks, and then do a factory restore with the disks.

The second option worked for me, maybe you will have luck with this

[RealBlackStuff]

Any of those non-Thinkpads with a model-number ending with a 5, had an AMD CPU in it (to compete with HP's junk?).
The matching Z560 with Intel was already an undesirable, so a Z565 with AMD is even less preferable!
Remember, this really is a Thinkpad forum, not an Ideapad forum.