factory installatio cd restore fails Windows authentication

[danleff]

I have a Thinkpad R-30, which I originally was able to obtain the factory CD recovery cd disks for. I replaced the old defective hard drive with a new Seagate drive. I was able to reinstall the system with Windows XP using the recovery disks, but the install failed the Windows authentication test and the system is now unusable (30 days elapsed).

I have not been able to find a solution for this searching these forums, or the Lenovo website.

I used the COA from the back of the system, which may have been my mistake? Please advise if anyone has any solutions.

[jdhurst]

Perhaps you have the wrong recovery CD's?

Correct CD's and a proper install will never need authentication on an IBM machine. If you have the correct CD's, you can save your data and try the recovery again. ... JD Hurst

[danleff]

These are the original 2 CD recovery set from IBM, marked;

"Product Recovery CD-ROM for IBM Thinkpad R30 MT 2656"

...which is the correct exact model number of my Thinkpad (2656).

Perhaps the auto-update feature downloaded the Windows Certification software and this caused the problem. Let me try another recovery and see what happens.

Thank you for the response.

[jdhurst]

A couple of things:
1. It has been six years since a ThinkPad of mine has had two recovery CD's. A T30 needs three, and modern T machines need five, six or seven CD's. Are you sure you have a complete set? If the recovery goes wrong and uses only the first two of a more-than-two set, it will ask for the activation key and you know it has gone wrong (been there, done that, more than once).

2. A recovery process is stand-alone, and most definitely should not be connected to a live internet, so auto update should not have anything to do with it. I think the first point above may be your problem.
... JD Hurst

[tselling]

The recovery should not ask for a product ID so you shouldn't have had to use the COA. If you look in the I386 directory for unattended.txt there should be a product ID there that should have automatically been used. You may be able to change it now to that one to use.

[danleff]

Understood. This would explain a few things.

Thanks for the responses. I will look and see if I am missing a cd. I only remember having two, but I'll look for another.

The machine was standalone during the restore process. It seemed to have completed fine, but let me look at it again.

What I was referring to with authentication, was that once I connected to the internet, the updates were applied from Microsoft. At this point, i started to get the messages. As you would expect, if the verification tool was installed, this was the issue. It told me that I needed to call Microsoft...that my Windows OS was not a verified copy.

It will take me a day or so to do this again. I will report back my results, either way.

[jdhurst]

I truly have not seen an IBM machine fail authentication after proper install and after doing updates.

However, there are now credible news stories on the internet that say that WGA is failing and Microsoft is aware of it.

I would be more concerned that you have a proper install (someone with your model should be able to post and say how many recovery CD's there is), and then call Microsoft once the updates start.
... JD Hurst

[Tigsman]

actually, i have seen this before. IF for any reason one of the sysprep scripts dont function correctly, it could cause this. Early termination of the recovery process could also cause this. Not running on AC may cause this issue.

Usually I suggest to my customers to attempt reload again with same CDs and it usually works.


T

[BillD]

Or call MS and tell them your problem. They're usually very good about activating XP over the phone if you're having problems...

[danleff]

Thanks folks, for the prodding. After two more attemps, I was able to recover the system. I needed to zero write the drive, format it as fat 32 (per Linux software) and do the recovery.

FYI, there are only two recovery disks for the R-30, as confirmed by the documentation that came with the disks.

The issue did seem to be resident in the recovery process. I had to do several reboots, as the system kept going into hibernation mode and not rebooting correctly. But once I haggled with that, the recovery completed. The recovery process also auto-formatted from fat32 to NTFS.

I'll check the bios on the hibernation issue.

So, I assume that the comments about the recovery process not completing fully, were correct, that affected the prompt for the activation, or so I assume.

In any case, thank you for all the responses and helpful posts! My daughter is a happy camper!

Dan

[davidspalding]

...If you look in the I386 directory for unattended.txt there should be a product ID there that should have automatically been used. ...

BTW. Thanks, I didn't know about that file! Good thing to back up on safe media.

[hbrednek]

This thread is interesting. I have had the following experience and any insight would be most welcome.

I have a T23 for which the original disk has failed. I purchased a replacement disk and the recovery CDs. Without a great deal of trouble I was able to replace the disk and fully recover Windows XP and also have Kubuntu Linux on the machine, with Kubuntu's grub doing the OS selection at boot time.

I remember the recovery process went smoothly (the Windows XP recovery -- Kubuntu always goes smoothly) with the recovery process informing me after a few reboots that it was converting the file system to NTFS, putting up a quite attractive IBM wallpaper of a world map with time zones and creating hidden partition -- presumably for future recovery purposes. It also put some IBM specific utilities on the system. It didn't ask me for a CoA, just went ahead and did the right thing. I then went ahead and did the full Microsoft patching and such -- again without a hitch.

Then, a month or so later, I did a Bad Thing. Following the mis-advice of a friend who supposedly knows about such things, I tried to put the CA virus protection monstrosity on the machine. It disemboweled the OS in the process, destroying the Windows XP installation. However, since Kubuntu was still there and able to read the disk, I was able to recover the data I needed without much fanfare.

So, I thought, let's put XP back on like before and go about our business -- but this time with no naughty virus programs. No dice. On the exact same hardware, with the exact same recovery CDs, I was now having the generic XP installed with the bucolic green field background and having a 30 day deadline for registration! Ack! I installed and re-installed (and re-installed) several times, always with the same result. In hopes that I could get past this to the remainder of the installation I called MS with the CoA and they did whatever they needed to do so that it now thinks it's properly registered.

But it never completed! I now have a plain-vanilla XP with no IBM-specific stuff running on a FAT32 file system! Ack! Is there anything I can do to make it work like the first time?

[carbon_unit]

Go here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... VSU-UPDATE
Install ThinkVantage System Update and it will install most of the stuff you are missing.

[JHEM]

But it never completed!

For some reason in these types of recoveries (an altered BOOT) the recovery process runs a "Repair" on the XP bits it finds and treats it as a new install which requires registration.

This is an MS flaw and not something that IBM/Lenovo can overcome.

Had you wiped the HD clean before starting the recovery from the CDs, everything would have gone like the original install you experienced.

James

[jdhurst]

<snip>
For some reason in these types of recoveries (an altered BOOT) the recovery process runs a "Repair" on the XP bits it finds and treats it as a new install which requires registration.
<snip>

Most helpful. If you have trouble with a recovery and call IBM Help, they will tell you to exit the initial recovery which lands you in X:>. From there run FDISK and remove all partitions, then run FDISK /MBR. Then on restart, the recovery runs normally. I have posted this process elsewhere here and it works, but I never knew why until now.

Of course, the technique I outlined doesn't work in a multiboot environment.

... JD Hurst

[hbrednek]

But it never completed!

Had you wiped the HD clean before starting the recovery from the CDs, everything would have gone like the original install you experienced.

I understand the concept of wiping the HD clean in the abstract but what does that mean in reality? That is, just how can one go about "wiping the HD clean"? I can, for example, boot Kubuntu or Knoppix and run the 'shred' utility on /dev/hda. But does that do what is needed? Because at one point I did that -- but didn't let it complete since it would take quite a while. But I can do it again and let it run for an hour or so if that's what it takes.

Since I have very little invested in the current (broken) installation, I'm quite willing to try again and post the results for anyone else in a similar situation.

In reading the man page for shred, I noticed the --zero option to "add a final overwrite with zeroes to hide shredding". Is this the sort of thing that is needed? Any advice on just how to properly "wipe" the disk would be most welcome.

[hbrednek]

Of course, the technique I outlined doesn't work in a multiboot environment.

... JD Hurst

Actually I have some experience with that. In the original (successful) installation, I had originally installed Kubuntu and left a primary partition (hda1) available for the eventual installation of Windows XP. I don't remember what type I set the partition to but I think it was ntfs. I did not create a second partition for the hidden stuff. Kubuntu created a grub file which then ran kubuntu without a problem.

I rather expected the recovery CDs to simply wipe out everything that was on the disk, including the kubuntu installation. That didn't happen. Instead, as I recall, it used the existing hda1 partition without perturbing the Kubuntu installation! It was, however, unable to reboot. I think I then went into the grub configruation file and added hda1 as a boot option for Windows and then used that for the remainder of the (successful) installation. An important aspect of this is that apparently the installation procedure will use a less than entire disk partition if that partition exists before the installation procedure is invoked.

I'll post any results I find.

[K0LO]

Just writing zeros to all sectors of hda1 should be enough (unless you work for NSA and want to hide all traces of the previous data).

[hbrednek]

Just writing zeros to all sectors of hda1 should be enough (unless you work for NSA and want to hide all traces of the previous data).

Right. But just how does one go about doing that? The problem with shred --zero is that it takes hours (at least on an 80Gb drive, it does). Unnecessarily thorough, I grant you, but how else does one go about writing all zeroes to a disk?

I looked at the fdisk solution offered earlier. That sounded practical until I found that my wimpy rump generic install of XP didn't have a version of fdisk -- although it did have format.

What I'm trying right now is running from a Knoppix CD:

shred --verbose --zero --iterations=0 /dev/hda

which is a lot faster than the default 25 passes of random data used by default. Maybe in an hour or so I can report what happens.

[K0LO]

That sounds reasonable; although I've never tried using shred. The last time that I zeroed my 60 GB drive I was using Acronis Disk Director. To zero all bytes on the entire drive took about 45 minutes.

The X41T has a rather slow hard drive with a measured transfer rate of 22 MB/sec, so to write to all 60 GB theoretically takes 2700 sec or 45 min.

If your drive is a modern 7200 rpm notebook drive it'll be faster than mine, perhaps 40 MB/sec, so it should take 2000 sec or 33 min to zero all 80 GB and less to zero only the hda1 partition.

[hbrednek]

shred --verbose --zero --iterations=0 /dev/hda

which is a lot faster than the default 25 passes of random data used by default. Maybe in an hour or so I can report what happens.

This was eventually successful. It took shred about an hour to do its thing on an 80Gb -- but probably slow -- drive. I then created a 20Gb ntfs partition as hda1 and ran the recovery CDs.

This was not immediately successful. Sigh. I wish I had a nice formula to follow but it was not to be. When the first pass recovery finished, the machine rebooted and then just sat there with a blinking cursor on an otherwise blank screen. I then restarted Knoppix and removed the partition and otherwise fiddled with things until it eventually completed installation.

But it worked and the machine is now dual booting XP and Kubuntu.