770ED Recovery CD issues

[Lexx_DMC]

Hi all,

Looking for more help please, this time on a 770ED I have. I recently purchased this, but it came with Windows XP Pro installed. The poor machine is nearly keeling over, no idea why XP was installed on it.

I want to restore to factory / Windows 95. I have tried 2 different 770 recovery CD's now, from Archive.org, and both do the same thing, start booting from CD, then straight after loading the CD-ROM driver, reboots. It does this endlessly.
I have also tried a "hacked" version of this CD produced by another Thinkpads forum member, but that does exactly the same thing.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong, or is there some other fault?

I tried an original Windows 98 CD too, that seemed to hang after loading the CD driver. I then loaded an XP Pro CD I have, that installed without incident, albeit taking an absolute age!

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks

(I'll work on a signature soon )

[panips]

Not sure but the symptom looks like you have used the wrong recovery media. Usually the recovery program tries to initialize some of the context and would fail loading recovery.sys at

DEVICE=RECOVERY.SYS

of config.sys when booting. This will cause an error and you laptop would reboot right after that.
770 and 770ED are different machines. Again, if you prefer factory installation, you can always use the recovery CD to overwrite a full installed system. In your case, I assume you used the 770 recovery CD, which has

EJUSFA0.IMZ
EJUSFA1.IMZ
EJUSFA2.IMZ
EJUSFA3.IMZ
...

Take a look at each file, and try finding a windows system file to identify it's version, for example,

EJUSFA1.IMZ\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\kernel32.dll

And it shows the dll version is 4.03.1212 (or 4.3.0.1212), which is in fact a Windows 95B with USB supporting. So you can install a (raw) Windows 95B, and extract all 4 .imz files to overwrite the disk, excluding the root directory.

[Lexx_DMC]

Hi panips,

Thanks again for the reply, much appreciated.

That's probably the issue, I could only find 770 recovery media online unfortunately. I know 770ED recovery media is held on this forum repository by Bill / terminator, but I don't meet the minimum criteria yet to be able to submit a request for some media .

I know some recovery media is model specific, I didn't realise it applied to the 770. It doesn't explain why my original Windows 98 retail disc hangs on boot up, but you've given me something to think about with extracting the imz files and overwriting a fresh windows 95 install (once I confirm the version). I will give this a go tomorrow.

Thanks

[GenkiMan]

Hi Lexx_DMC,

I am currently having the same problem as you.
I did manage to install Windows 95b but there are so many resource conflicts and drivers missing that i just don't know where to start.

Did you manage to restore your 770ED?

[Lexx_DMC]

Hi GenkiMan,

Unfortunately, I never got round to re-visiting this one, as I have several other ThinkPad's to work on, and not enough time .

It is listed in the Recovery Set Repository for Community Members, and I should now meet the requirements to request this recovery media from the owner. I will politely request this when I'm ready to try this lappie again.

[GenkiMan]

I tried to request it but I have not received any response.
I wonder if everything is ok.

Best regards