Thinkpads Forum

I bought my husband a T500 for his birthday. I ordered direct from Lenovo, and the original config was with Vista Business but I paid extra for the XP-Pro downgrade. The sticker on the bottom of the laptop says Vista Business, and it boots into XP.

My husband promptly ran the Create Recovery Media option which created one separate disk and another set of 8 disks.

My question is if he were to have to restore using the disks he created, which operating system (XP or Vista Business) would be installed? I called support twice and got two different answers.

Anyone with any similar experience with this process?

Thanks!

Hm, if the laptop boots into XP, I assume the preload partition is also for XP (because I believe Lenovo performs such downgrades uniformly), so there is no chance that there have been created recovery CDs for Vista (just from a fool-proof standpoint), that means using these CDs there would be installed only XP (resp. Lenovo XP image including all Lenovo software). (I hope I haven´t missed the point in your post )

Marin

If I were you (and I see a lot of these issues), order XP recovery CD's AND Vista Business recovery CD's for your laptop and pay the money. You may wish to be in Vista one day anyway, and in the meantime, if you have a failure, having bona-fide recovery CD's is the best insurance. .... JDH

If you have any doubt, I would order the sets (get both Windows Vista Business and Windows XP Professional - like jdhurst suggests) from Lenovo. They're not expensive, and come the day when you need to recover the system (or easily switch O/Ss) the convenience of a known good set of recovery discs is well worth the modest cash outlay (at least in my mind).

Also keep in mind, that if you want to do a custom restore, you can achieve that when using the discs: you need first recover the full factory image from the discs. Then when the factory partition laid down, perform a second recovery from the factory partition. From that point you can perform a custom restoration.

So a couple of things I do not understand:

1) Since when one has to pay more to get XP Pro downgrade when ordering Vista business? I thought it was part of the standard license on a laptop.

2) Doesn't Lenovo provide this recovery CDs free of charge, when the machine is under warranty? (limited to one copy of each of course) Or is this service only free in some regions? Maybe it's a matter of talking to the right service rep?

Paying for the CD's is not paying for licensing - it is paying for creation and distribution. So one is not paying for the change in OS.

It has now been several years since IBM/Lenovo stopped supplying free recovery CD's. I had a client hard drive fail on a machine that was a single model (purchased after a group). Getting the recovery CD's (much needed) were more expensive than if I had ordered them initially on behalf of the client. .... JDH

emkay717 wrote: My question is if he were to have to restore using the disks he created, which operating system (XP or Vista Business) would be installed?

The created discs will install XP. There has been a big discussion on this, including the confusing reports, in the Lenovo Community forum here.

You can check this by booting from the first disc; if while booting you see "Vista is loading files", (or similar), you know what you have as XP discs don't display this message. You will then be able to choose to do nothing and restart without having made any changes.

That being said; it is definitely advisable to check the discs. If you have a spare hard drive you can use, insert it and run a recovery from the discs to make sure they work as expected. It would be a sad day if they didn't work when you really need them.