Recovery woes

[cacophony]

I just got a Thinkpad T60p from eBay. I like to do a complete system restore when I get a new system, but I ran into some problems.

What I've done so far:

Restarted machine and pressed Thinkvantage button at Lenovo screen.
Went into rescue and restore section and requested to burn recovery discs.
It asked me for the blank disc to burn the startup stuff. I put in a blank DVD and it successfully burned.
It then asked for another disc to burn disc 1. I put in another blank DVD and it appeared to successfully burn everything else to the single DVD (I was hoping to avoid having to burn 6 individual CDs). The DVD was full when I removed it and it said "success", so I figured everything would go smoothly.

So then I booted from the startup DVD, and everything went alright until it asked for disc 1. I put in the other DVD and it says it's not the correct disc. I can't seem to get out of this state now. Tried restarted with or without the DVD(s), and it always asks for disc 1.

I have a T60 as well and have a copy of the CD ISO images for the T60 recovery media on another computer. I burned the ISO image for CD 1 and that seems to be working. Now it's asking for disc 2.

I assume the T60 recovery discs are identical to the T60P?

I guess the lesson is not to burn to a DVD.

Thanks!

[cacophony]

Hmmm... well after burning/inserting disks 1-6, it returned me to the Rescue and Recovery area with the following error:

"product recovery failed during the convertion phase"

Now what?

[TuuS]

If your recovery discs are designed for CDr media, you need to use that type of disc.

I would start over at the beginning if I were you, but just in case your unaware, when you install from these discs, your not only installing a 4-5yo operating system, and 4-5yo apps/drivers, your also installling another full copy of all this, and a third redundant copy in the form of disc images. Why not just save all that disc space and install from an upto date windows version, then instead of a recovery partition, you can make one with a second windows installation, so if your system becomes unusable, you can simply restart and boot into the backup copy of windows and your up and running in less then 2 minutes... and you can fix the old installation when time permits.

In my opinion, this is a far better use of disc space. The lenovo system was good when all this was new, but not if you need to replace it all after a restore, with service packs, app updates, etc...

[cacophony]

Thanks for the reply. I started the installation over from scratch (using all CDs) and it did work fine this time.

Re: the idea of using a more up to date Windows, doesn't that mean I'd have to purchase Windows separately?

[cadillacmike68]

You have to start somewhere. And yes, you would have to 'obtain' the CD set / DVDs for any other windows version, even an XP version with SP2 for instance.

What Tuus is saying is if you get a fresher install, you can backup / save that off somwhere - with all the service packs and security updates already installed. Then it's easier when there's a problem.

But i disagree about there being 3 redundant copies. There is the install set on the CDs and the installation on the target computer. Some restore options allow you to re-create the service partition on the target HDD, but this is hardly redundant IMnshO, and an accessible, usable recovery, install no matter what its age is better than a blank HDD with no way to get an OS onto it.

Besides HDDs are so inexpensive, you can get entire disks to use as a backup drive (and clone a system to the other HDD once you get it the way you like it). Take it from me the guy with approx 20 bootable ThinkPad HDDs with W98 & or XPP on them. Tuus - spend a few $ and get another backup HDD!