Help with T20 recovery please!

[NickC]

I have a T20 along with a Windows 2000 recovery (bootable) CD. I am trying to recover the machine using this CD. I boot from it, go through the warnings, and then (after the little recovery splash screen), it immediately dies with : Error #4 Bad argument/parameter. This happens at the stage where it first starts preparing the hard drive - with the progress meters on the bottom. How can I solve this?

I should note that I did mess around with the OS a bit. I formatted and partitioned it, tried out XP as well as Linux on it. Now I'd like to revert it back to the way it was. I seem to remember reading that I would have to first format it independent of the recovery CD, but shouldn't a recovery CD typically wipe out the drive first? I've used recovery CDs before, and that's how they've worked.

I searched for this, but no luck.

[carbon_unit]

I've had the same error before but I don't remember how I got around it.
I think that if you delete all the partitions on the Hard drive the cd's will install with the option of recreating the restore partition.
Make sure you set the bios to boot from the cd first when using the restore cd's.

[JHEM]

I seem to remember reading that I would have to first format it independent of the recovery CD, but shouldn't a recovery CD typically wipe out the drive first? I've used recovery CDs before, and that's how they've worked.

Not if the HD is presently formatted in such a way that W2K can't see it, e.g. NTFS!

Get a W98 bootdisk and run FDISK. Remove ALL partitions, then FDISK again making sure you enable LBA and have set the primary partiton active.

Put the recovery CD in your T20 and then run the recovery program.

Regards,

James

[NickC]

Thanks, I'll try that. Yes, when I was playing around with XP & Linux, I had it into two main partitions: NTFS for XP and another for Linux (I forget the exact set of Linux partitions).

[egibbs]

If you have the IBM PC Doctor disks there is a "Full Erase Hard Drive" function in there that will do the trick. Start it and go to the movies - dakes a couple hours but the disk will be able to be recovered afterward.

Ed Gibbs

[NickC]

I got this working! I used an FDISK CD to delete the partitions. I was then able to restore completely. I still hit a snag upon the first boot up, where it booted into a GRUB prompt (left over from the Linux install). I did a MBR restore and all is well! Thanks again everyone!