? Create Recovery Disks R40

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bmoberg · #1 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 9:03 am

Forgive me if this is answered somewhere else, I tried to find it.

I have an R40 that I am trying to restore to factory defaults as it will be converted to a field laptop. I want to replace the HDD but cannot figure out how to create the recovery media so I can restore to factory defaults the IBM partition on the new drive. I know I can order copies of the Recovery media, but shouldn't I be able to do that with a working system?

Is an upgrade of Rescue and Recovery needed? I cannot even find the option when I select the "Access IBM" button.

vanaya · #2 Post by **vanaya** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 9:26 am

Welcome to the forum!!

I think the Hardware Maintenance Manual (download here) will explain it better than I can. The Product Recovery Program starts on page 28.

bmoberg · #3 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 9:52 am

Thanks for the quick reply.
From my review, it would appear that ordering the CD is the only solution. There is no way to create it from the original.

Is this accurate?

vanaya · #4 Post by **vanaya** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:30 am

When you hit your blue "Access IBM" button does it take you to the Access IBM program?? I will try and guide you through it.

bmoberg · #5 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:34 am

Yes, it does, but there is no option to create recovery media. This is an older laptop. Is there an upgrade to Access IBM, or can I upgrade to Rescue and Recovery?

vanaya · #6 Post by **vanaya** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:38 am

PM Sent.

bmoberg · #7 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:32 pm

I appreciate the offer for the Recovery CD's.

Before I spent the money, I thought I would try and accomplish the same thing with what I already have. The original drive is not damaged, just too small to use the machine affectively as planned.

If there is no way to do it without buying the CD's, I 'll have to reconsider.

No offense.

vanaya · #8 Post by **vanaya** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:04 pm

None taken. I think I remember a long time ago under start>all programs>thinkpad there was an option to create recovery media. Now that I'm looking I can't find it anymore. Let me log on my old trusty T21 and fiddle with my R40 and report back.

andyP · #9 Post by **andyP** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:04 pm

How's about cloning the drive to a new one with Acronis or similar utility?
Plenty of advice on how to do it can be found in the forum.

Terrahawk · #10 Post by **Terrahawk** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 4:14 pm

I have managed to export the recovery partition off my R40's old hard disk successfully install it onto another hard disk. My upgraded R40's 60 GB drive has full functionality with the Access IBM button on bootup and it certainly didn't when it came from my supplier. If you would like to do that, I can try to post the instructions, as it is a reasonably time-consuming procedure

You cannot export the recovery partition using Acronis or any standard disk cloning software as the recovery partition is in a "hidden" area of the hard drive. What happens here is that the drive under-reports the size of the disk and it is in the unreported space that the recovery partition lies. I know that this is the case for the R40, X31 and T40 models - I think that the later models use a recovery partition that can be seen by a hard disk cloning utility.

The tools are built in, and you do not need anything apart from DOS boot floppy with fdisk and format (or a Windows 98 installation CD) and the willingness to lose all the data on your old hard drive.

The way I did it involved no other equipment apart from one R40, one original R40 hard drive, and another computer with a DVD writer and a network connection (that can be used to link the R40 and the other computer together).

vanaya · #11 Post by **vanaya** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 5:39 pm

Also agree on cloning. When I initially upgraded, I bought the 2nd HDD adapter and did the trial of Acronis. Then after another upgrade is when I just went after the recovery disks. As you are looking into trying to do with what you have at hand, do you have access to another computer and does it have a cd-rw?

bmoberg · #12 Post by **bmoberg** » Wed Jun 04, 2008 8:50 am

Sure, I'd appreciate the steps you used.

I have access to another computer, network, CD and DVD burners.

Thanks for all the replies.

Terrahawk · #13 Post by **Terrahawk** » Wed Jun 04, 2008 4:09 pm

Well, here is what I did with my R40 back when I was wanting to upgrade from my little 20 GB 4200 RPM drive to a 60 GB 5400 RPM drive. These are the steps I followed and they worked well for me.

Before you start, make sure the restore partition security is set to "Normal" in the BIOS.

1) Back up all your data to somewhere safe, if you want to keep it.

2) Make sure that the old drive with the Access IBM restore partition is installed in the R40.

2) Find a Windows XP boot CD (doesn't matter what sort but XP Professional is preferred as your R40 most likely has an XP Pro COA on the bottom) and boot off it. When it gets to the stage of partitioning the disk, make two partitions, say each one half of the remaining disk size. For my 20 GB disk, I had 16 GB remaining after the restore partition so I made 2 8 GB partitions. Install Windows XP on one of them. Leave the second partition alone for now.

3) Once Windows has installed, check whether you need to load network drivers. The R40 has a Intel Pro/100 VE onboard ethernet adapter. You will need this to transfer the restore partition image to the other computer later on. You do not need to install any other drivers since you won't be keeping this XP installation for long.

4) Open the Control Panel and find the Administrative Tools (in Category View, they are under "Performance and Maintenance")

5) In the Administrative Tools, open Computer Management and find Disk Management. Click on it.

6) You will see a display of the disk partitions, a C drive where you just installed Windows XP and an unformatted partition. Format the unformatted partition as FAT32.

7) Reboot the R40 and press Acess IBM on startup to enter the preload utilities. Start the "Recover to factory contents" procedure.

When you see the Main Menu with "Factory Contents: Reformat your hard drive and install Windows XP etc, blah" press F3. That will drop you to a DOS prompt. It's actually Windows 98SE DOS

9) Find out what drive letter your FAT32 partition has been assigned. I did not know any fast way of doing this so I just went through the alphabet looking for freshly formatted 8GB drives. Just for this exercise, let's call your partition E drive. However, it is likely that your FAT32 partition will be called C drive as it is the first partition on the main hard drive that Windows 98 DOS understands. The recovery utilities occupy three drives - A, C and D. If your partition has been nominated as C drive, the recovery utilities will occupy A, D and E drives. The DVD-ROM drive is not available at present as no driver has been loaded.

10) You will find in D:\RECOVERY (or E:\RECOVERY) and FWBACKUP.EXE and FWRESTOR.EXE utilities. Copy them (and anything else that looks interesting) to your E drive partition.

11) Run the FWBACKUP.EXE utility. It has the following format:
FWBACKUP.EXE size=<span size file in megabytes> file=<destination file name>
I would use FWBACKUP.EXE size=700 file=E:\R40HPA (remember, E drive is your freshly formatted 8GB partition, substitute the correct drive letter in for your setup). A 700 MB file allows you to write multiple CDs if you need to but I would not specify a file size greater than 2 GB as Windows 98 DOS may object.

12) Wait for ages as it backs up the Access IBM image to your FAT32 partition.

13) Once it has finished, reboot into Windows XP and open your FAT32 drive in Explorer. You will see several files, the utilities you put there as well as a number of files, most likely R40HPA.001 to R40HPA.005 depending on the file size you specified.

14) Copy these files over the network to the computer with the DVD writer.

15) Create a bootable DVD that boots into a DOS of some sort that understands FAT32 partitions. Include on this DVD the following items:
- ATAPI CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE
- FWBACKUP and FWRESTOR utilities, FWRESTOR is most important.
- All the R40HPA.XXX files
You *must* make sure this DVD boots into DOS and loads up the CD-ROM driver (something like OAKCDROM.SYS will work) otherwise you will have no access to the bulk of your written DVD.

16) Remove old hard drive and insert shiny new hard drive.

17) Run FWRESTOR file=R40HPA

18) Wait for ages as it puts the Access IBM restore partition onto the new hard drive. Thankfully, a progress indicator is shown.

19) Reboot the computer and press Access IBM when indicated.

20) Enjoy your new restore partition, and what you may well want to do here with your new drive is do a factory restore

Terrahawk · #14 Post by **Terrahawk** » Wed Jun 04, 2008 4:13 pm

Additionally, you may be interested to know that R40's Access IBM partition works fine on the X31 and T40 too, and can be restored onto a hard drive destined for one of those machines. The only issue is that the Access IBM utility has pictures of the R40 all through it

Terrahawk · #15 Post by **Terrahawk** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 8:41 pm

So... did it work?

bmoberg · #16 Post by **bmoberg** » Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:58 am

Sorry for the long delay. I haven't started yet but am looking to today.

bmoberg · #17 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:43 am

I reconsidered and ordered the recovery CD's as I have 4 more of these R40's and figured it would be a good idea. So, now I have the new 80GB HDD installed and booted from the recovery CD. I selected "Restore Original" and was greeted by the following error...

Error #88 Unable to find correct drive

Ideas?

Thanks again for all your help.

bmoberg · #18 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:15 am

Answered. The new HDD was bad. I had bought a second identical drive in preparation for a second R40 Upgrade and decided to give it a try. What do you know, the Recovery CD booted and immediately began the recovery process when it recognized that the HDD did not have the recovery partition installed. It is in the middle of the recovery process now.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

bmoberg · #19 Post by **bmoberg** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 11:40 am

Recovery completed successfully. Obviously a bad HDD.

voneschenbach · #20 Post by **voneschenbach** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:11 pm

Thank you all - I was just trying to accomplish this and ran into problems finding the recovery CD option in the R40. Can't wait to try this on my R40s.

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