R51e failure to initialize during recovery

[alanr51e]

Hi all,

Title says it all, but the history is that the R51e had a major crash during an update (my fault - it had been sitting idle for a number of months and I powered up on mains, it went looking for updates and early in the process we had a mains failure before the battery had any charge). I'm guessing a vital file got corrupted, because it would not boot afterwards.

Since I was going to have to rebuild I thought I might have a look at a Linux system beforehand and loaded Mint 14 - seemed Ok but I use the R51e for simple CAD work using AutoCAD lite - won't run under linux - back to the recovery disks.

Loads the Rescue and recovery screen OK, then loads a bunch of files, but with about 20% of the activity bar left generates a "failure to initialise" and hangs.

Since the HDD has been loaded with a Linux OS, I'm guessing there might have been something done to the formatting and the recovery is having trouble partitioning the drive for the hidden partition, also the CMOS battery is showing 3V which seems a bit low for a Lithium cell ( never been changed in the six years I've been using the device) so I'm wondering if the recovery wants to write to CMOS but there isn't sufficient cell energy to get this done.

I'll go source a new CMOS battery and fit it, but I thought someone with more familiarity here might have some pointers

Any help gratefully received.

Cheers

AlanD

[RealBlackStuff]

Try and run DBAN to clear off all the old contents of that HD. http://www.dban.org/

[alanr51e]

Try and run DBAN to clear off all the old contents of that HD. http://www.dban.org/

Thanks RBS and apologies for not getting back sooner, but it took a while for the battery to arrive.

In any event, it happens that all I needed to do was destroy any partitions already on the HDD, Format it and the recovery went ahead without further drama, but it did use up a half day for dis-assembly of the laptop, fitting the battery and re-assembling then the recovery process.

Fortunately I had the recovery discs 2 through 6 on a DVD so there wasn't a lot of disc swapping involved.

Thanks again for the advice.

Alan