Whoops! Need to manually reinstall Windows?

[FelixGordon]

Hey guys,

For some reason the newest version of Gentoo has some fancy GUI installer which, either through encouraging me to be stupid, or through a bug, caused me to destroy hda1 & hda2, meaning that my rescue and recovery partition went south along with my Windows partition.

I had a set of recovery CDs, but they fail somewhere, looks like there's a corrupt file on them. Booting from a newly made R&R disk starts of the restore to factory state, but then fails saying that the feature has been removed. I assume this means I've lost my predesktop area too? Am I stuck with installing everything myself?

I've already manually installed XP pro, but the version I have wouldn't accept my OEM product key, had to use one from another source. Now I'm in driver hell downloading the various things from the IBM website, trying to get it back to a reasonable state.

At this stage of reinstalling manually is it worth just finishing the job the hard way, or is there some way I can attempt to restore to factory state (I would prefer this..) from the predesktop area if it isn't nuked, given that the option doesn't seem available to me...? :/

I've read something about repartitioning and restoring the MBR being necessary to get the predesktop area accessible again. Does it sound like that's what I need to do?

Thanks in advance for any help/direction.

Cheers,

Felix

[Kyocera]

Click on the HD clone link in my signature below and follow the Replace or Repair F11 function directions, good luck hope that works.

[jdhurst]

I would call IBM and say the hard drive failed (it did, after a fashion) and you need recovery CD's for the new drive you got. While you are at it, take the opportunity to get a bigger drive. Until I see a 7200-rpm or faster, 1 TByte or bigger drive, I would say there is never enough drive space.

I know Lenovo is in here, and I think we need to push on this idea of hard drive only recovery. There are now countless different reasons in here why CD's are necessary, and lots of examples of CD's failing that were created by the owner on newer TP's. I have had two sets of recovery CD's supplied by IBM fail (and then replaced). The current recovery capabilities can only be described as ruinously unsafe to the owner who puts food in Lenovo's mouth.

... JD Hurst

[FelixGordon]

2nd hand T42p here, it isn't exactly a new drive that failed, and unfortunately I don't have time to wait for recovery CDs to be posted out to me, nor to I have the cash to blow on a new bigger harddrive. - I'm heading overseas in a week, so I'm trying to get this back up and running ASAP.

I'll check out that HD Clone program, Kyocera, thanks.

The ThinkVantage software installer seems to have found a lot more stuff online to download and install this time, with some luck I'll have everything running okay by the end of the day.

What a pain in the [censored] though.

[FelixGordon]

* R & R repair diskette, I mean, not HD Clone.

[Kyocera]

It is a pain but I have found even being able to recover via the partition or the cd's you still have to go to the web and get all the updates Lenovo/Ms and load all your everyday apps and of course tweak everything. Definately a pain.

[FelixGordon]

Yeah, I'm fortunate in that I hadn't really set up any of my own software in Windows on this machine yet.. I kind of figured there was a high chance of me breaking something.

The ThinkVantage software seems to be doing its job well enough though, hopefully I'll be back where I started soon enough.