R40 - Can't do Product Recovery from HD or CD's

Message

SWG · #1 Post by **SWG** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 5:51 am

I hope somebody can help me with this ... have been trying for days to resolve it.

I have a three year old Thinkpad R40. Running WIndows XP Pro, SP2. 60G HD, 512M memory. A few days ago, after deleting some software using XP's delete tools, my system stopped working. Long story about how but esssentially would not boot into XP in normal or safe mode, kept running scandisk and finally would not boot at all.

I have tried to do a System Restore to factory settings using the IBM Access key and restore software in the HPA. I can get to the predesktop and the restore pgm starts then ends with a "Invalid media type reading drive C .... Abort, Retry, Fail." I was able to use another disk I had from a Dell desktop to get into the Recovery Console where I tried everything from fixboot, fixmbr to reformatting the C: drive with Fat32. Nothing seems to work. Keep getting the same results. I also tried the Restore and Recovery CD set from IBM for my system with the same results. During the last phases of the restore attempt I see PKUNZIP extracting (Searching ZIP: D:/RECOVERY/OKDS09A.IMZ") the last line before the invalid media type. Hitting the F(fail) key several times gives PKUNZIP (W10)warning! can't create C:\autoexec.bat and hitting f again several times gives similar warning about other programs it was trying to extract and load on the C: drive.

I have run PC Doctor diagnostics on the HD and aside from a bad cluster or two, no other problems. Have never had a problem with the HD before and I think it is OK. Again, I can boot into the on-disk Recovery Program. I have access to an external floppy drive which still works and can boot from the R40's CD drive if necessary.

Any suggestions, help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Bill G

kabsi · #2 Post by **kabsi** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 5:21 pm

SWG wrote:I have run PC Doctor diagnostics on the HD and aside from a bad cluster or two, no other problems.

What about replacing the HD anyway?

SWG · #3 Post by **SWG** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 5:49 am

kabsi,

I am now in the process of replacing the drive. The original Hitachi was a 60G, 4200rpm, pata, I will probably go with a faster drive (7200 rpm) with the same capacity, the 60G is enough storage for me .... looking at another Hitachi drive.

I tried everything to recover from this including a kind of low-level format of the drive (writing 0's into every cluster) to no avail. The format was successful but I still cannot use the IBM recovery CD's .... end up with exactly the same problem. So, time to replace the drive I guess.

If you have any other suggestions they would be welcomed.

Bill G.

SWG · #4 Post by **SWG** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 7:15 pm

Problem fixed.

Removed, swapped and re-seated the two 256M memory simms and I was able to recover using the IBM Recovery CD's.

Hard drive was OK.

Thanks to those who responded.

Bill G