Help please - rescue partition not accessible

[NeilM]

Please, I beg anyone for help.

I received a brand new z61m last week. The first check I did was whether I could access the ThinkVantage Rescue partition from the boot screen - it worked fine.

I then installed Windows Vista (a mistake in itself, it appears). I had also flashed the BIOS to the 30 January release (2.14) for Vista support.

The problem now is that it appears that either Vista or the BIOS update has caused the rescue partition to no longer be accessible. I installed XP from a clean install and I can still see the recovery partition of 5GB in the storage manager. So i know that the partition has not been deleted.

The problem is that when the boot screen says 'Press the blue thinkvantage button' and I do this, another message is shown that the startup process was interrupted and I can then only select the BIOS setup.

I have downloaded and burned bootable recovery CD's from the following link:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

I have tried both
rnr31_rrd.iso
rnr40_rrd.iso

- the cd's boot up fine but then i get a DOS abort/retry error and I cannot execute any programs on the CD's.

I have read the thread http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25861 and tried to access the utility posted by Ramian, but the files are no longer available.

I have flashed by BIOS to the earliest possible version for my embedded controller (7FET93WW (2.11) from http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-64305) but I have the same problem.

Here's the thing - we got 3 of these notebooks at the same time. Two of them BIOS have been flashed to 2.11 and the thinkvantage rescue utility is not accessible from the boot screen.
The other is still running BIOS version 2.09 and it can access the rescue partition from the boot menu, so I suspect that the BIOS update to 2.11 has hosed the rescue partition or MBR.

I am desperate for help - i have logged 2 calls with Lenovo already but no response from them (3 days have passed). I tried to install Windows XP from scratch but the system is highly unstable (cannot shut down and blue screens randomly).

I HAVE to restore the factory setup on this machine but I CANNOT get into the rescue utility from the boot menu. Please, any suggestions are much appreciated - I am getting very frustrated by not being able to restore to the factory setup and I cannot use my brand new Notebook!

[NeilM]

OK, I have finally managed to fix it by doing a clean install of XP, then installing Rescue and Recovery v4 downloaded from Lenovo's site, which somehow allowed the rescue partition to become available to the bootstrapper. So finally I have a factory-setup notebook to use. Yay!