A30 now saying "Error loading operating system"

[jhurst]

Help!! My Thinkpad A30 is now refusing to boot WinXP, saying just
"To Start the IBM Product Recovery program, press F11

Error loading operating system
Press a key to reboot"

then it repeats.

I seem to be able to get it to boot into a DOS mode, and then the main drive is visible as drive D. Did a scandisk, it found and 'fixed' 2 problems with files reporting the wrong size on drive D: - ntuser.log and default.log

But, how can I get to boot back into Windows? I have oodles of not-backed-up data !!! (ouch!)

[jdhurst]

Windows XP on an IBM ThinkPad automatically converts to NTFS (and so it should). If you booted to DOS and could deal with files on the main drive, you may have damaged the files. I also don't know why it saw the main drive as drive D: Normally (I've done this), booting to DOS on an NTFS machine will not permit display of the NTFS drive. DOS does not know what to do.

So if you can't get Windows going, and can't get any solution here or elsewhere, it sounds to me as if your drive may be OK, just corrupted. So take the drive out and to another ThinkPad (ultrabay or whatever) and see if you can see the drive from this other ThinkPad. If so, copy off the data you need, then put the corrupted drive back in your A30 and do the F11 recovery. Then get your data from the other ThinkPad.

Good luck. ... jdhurst