Recovery on a R51e Thinkpad

[alanr51e]

Hi,

Some of you may remember my posts of a two or three months ago seeking advice about upgrading an R51e with a larger HDD.

I have to admit that I almost gave up as attempts to clone the drive or use downloaded recovery media were fruitless.

Whilst I was happy about the build quality of the R51e the trials of the hidden partition and lack of success with attempts at cloning or use of "generic" recovery media had me so frustrated that I had almost gotten to the point of advertising the thinkpad and upgrading to a later model laptop. Of particular irritation was a comparison with upgrade on an HP Compaq Presario, which had CD media suppied with the laptop and allowed a straightforward upgrade path.

Preparatory to selling the R51e I returned it to "factory" standard via the "Thinkvantage" option at boot. I was astounded to see the option for generating recovery media reappear! Previously any attempt to load this .exe file had not been successful, but this time it worked and allowed the generation of one boot CD and five data CDs. After their generation the option of generating recovery CDs was greyed out as has been explained elsewhere.

But I wondered if another reset to factory specs might alter this and, having a hour to spare I tried and it does! At least on an R51e. After this reset it happily allowed me to make a second set of media, and I used the DVD option for the data disc.

I have now replaced the original Hitachi 40GB Travelstar with a 250 GB WD HDD and the generated recovery discs worked just fine. So far there have been no irritaing "fault" messages on booting.

So it may be that many thinkpads in the R series and perhaps T, A and Z series would be the same.

So if you are grappling with a second hand TP and can not generate recovery discs because thay have already been made, then it might be that by returning the TP to "As delivered" status will allow this.

Cheers

Alan

[RealBlackStuff]

Thanks for the info.
But that would only work IF there already was a restore partition in the first place!