760ED Restore / Recovery (English!)

[Lexx_DMC]

Hello all,

Hoping to get some advice from the experts here. I recently acquired a ThinkPad 760ED, which works perfectly, but I am struggling to find proper recovery media in English for it.

I found "IBM ThinkPad 760E/ED/EL Preload Restore CD-ROM (Windows95)", which was a CD containing the builddsk program, to create the bootable floppy, etc.

All worked fine, fully recovered, but it was a German recovery disc, so obviously everything is German. I have been searching for over a week and cannot find an English recovery disc that will work on my 760ED.

Found an English recovery ISO for a 760XL, which I have read should work, but have been unable to install it as it didn't come with the bootable floppy, and there was no loadsoft directory on the ISO for me to create a bootable floppy. I have been trying to frig a blend of both recovery discs for a few days now, and am failing miserably.

Can anyone help, and point me in the direction of English recovery media I can use for my 760ED?

Thanks in advance.

[panips]

According to the thinkpad supporting document, the boot disk for recovery cd is universal, you may try search tpp95rld.exe and create one.
I cannot find any 760ED recovery cd for English, usually I just install multiple os and boot to dos, os/2 or win95 for 75x and 76x.
760XL recovery cd is not good for 760ED, they have different hardware, such as audio (es1688 vs mwave). But if you insist to use 760XL recovery cd, you may try:
1) use the tpp95rld.exe paring with your 760XL recovery CD (with the file named DRxxxx?.IMZ where xx indicate the language/country), or
2) install a windows 95 OSR2 (version 4.0.0.1111), and extract all .imz (zipped) files on the recovery CD to overwrite the whole disk, excluding files in the root directory, such as command.com, msdos.sys, etc.

[Lexx_DMC]

Hi panips,

Thanks, I appreciate the prompt reply.

I will look into both of your suggestions, but will try number 2 first, given what you said about the hardware. I have many other machines I use for my Win 3.1/95/98 nostalgia fixes, but am trying to get my ThinkPads to factory states, with all the bloatware they would have had from new. I am fairly new to the ThinkPad world, but I have a rapidly growing collection, so I suspect I will be seeking more advice in the future!

Thanks again.

[Lexx_DMC]

Hi there,

Following the above, I went with option 2, installed fresh Win 95 OSR2, then overwrote everything barring the root directory with the contents of the 760XL IMZ files.

Some expected issues like display and sound drivers, obviously, which I will sort, no issue there.

The only thing I didn't expect is that everything has saved with the old 8 character filenames

Have I done something stupid?

Any help appreciated, and apologies for all the questions. It's been nearly 30 years since I have really dug around Windows 95. I am really enjoying working with these machines again, but have forgotten alot over the years
My other machines have mainly been XP / 98, and am only now starting to work on some of my oldest machines with 3.1, DOS & 95.

Thanks

[Lexx_DMC]

Ok, minor update. While doing a restore for another machine (600x), and I noticed that had a process where it ran something to "restore long filenames".

Obviously my manual overwrite doesn't cover doing this, so I will have to see if I can find the equivalent program / file on the stuff I extracted.

If anyone knows what this is, please let me know, as it would save me some time. If not, I will dig around next time I am working on the 760ED, and will post an update here if I figure it out, for others facing a similar issue.

Thanks

[solidpro]

Oh blimey you've just rang a bell. Something about 16-bit windows didn't support file names longer than 8 characters or something and the first version of windows was the same. I seem to remember this being a massive pain in the transition where programs would 'tilder' filenames and mess everything up.... This isn't an answer, but just a note.

[panips]

Windows 95/98 provided a tool named "(L)ong (F)ile (N)ame (B)ac(K)up", so it helps to restore the long file name after recovery.
Please check your root directory after manually extracted all recovery CD files, where you can see a file

"LFNBK.DAT"

and then, use the tool locates at c:\windows\lfnbk.exe

You need to manually restore the dat file.

Ok, minor update. While doing a restore for another machine (600x), and I noticed that had a process where it ran something to "restore long filenames".

Obviously my manual overwrite doesn't cover doing this, so I will have to see if I can find the equivalent program / file on the stuff I extracted.

If anyone knows what this is, please let me know, as it would save me some time. If not, I will dig around next time I am working on the 760ED, and will post an update here if I figure it out, for others facing a similar issue.

Thanks