Good grief! (Subject edited to remove expletive)

[qchaser]

I am a... not so proud... owner of a couple of months old X41. Last Friday I experienced a disaster.

I used the integrated software updater to check out updates. There were updates indeed and one of them was "rescue and recovery" which I downloaded. After the restart screen went black stating: "Operating system not found". I hit the access IBM button to recover my system but guess what, it didn´t work as it should. I assume that this service is somehow integrated into the operating system - which was not found. Okay, here I was with no XP disc or anything at all. I called a friend who was driving nearby to get in with his laptop. I used his computer (Fujitsu) to search for a solution. No solution. I should have made 7 recover discs or whateva what I hadn´t done. Sorry me.

I started to act as following:

I downloaded a hacked (this was a serious emergency) "bare bone" version of XP and installed it. It took about 5 minutes to install it. After this I downloaded wireless driver to get my Thinkpad online. I tried desperately to find solution for this problem. I could clearly see that there was this IBM partition on my HD but I couldn´t reach it. Okay, wtf, why should I need to reach it when I was online and was able to download whatever I wanted? Thats right. Here I was with my hacked and cracked piece of "XP" wondering what went wrong in the first place. I suppose my first mistake was to not make these 7 (or 9, or 10, or 15) recovery discs. What I think is that this kind of amount of discs is a joke. You could survive only with XP and Driver discs = 2 CD´s - and I didn´t even have these.

The next day when my girlfriend had been laughing her [censored] of because of my "spiritual experience" with IBM THINKPAD X41 I took myself to another friend and borrowed his XP Pro disc. I first logged into Bios and deleted this useless IBM partition. After that I installed this real XP Pro. Somehow the system didn´t accept the KEY which is in the bottom of my computer. Okay I used my friends KEY (still an emergency situation) and it was okay. Then I downloaded the Lenovo "software" downloader and took down everything else but the useless "rescue and recovery" joke software. All went very smoothly.

Now I am again a proud owner of X41. I use my friends XP because I didn´t get any XP of my own. I use my friends KEY because my own KEY didn´t seem to work. After the installation I found some weird Intel - hardware type which was missing a driver. I tried to find this driver from Intel, Google and from this forum. Waste of time. I didn´t find a solution or a driver. I could find threads of same kind of issue but no solution. I am talking about: Intel(R) 82801FBM LPC Interface Controller - 2641

I searched XP disch and my whole HD to find the driver... but without luck. Finally I did what a non-nerd should do: don´t go to the seas when you can fish from the coast:

1) Right click 82801
2) Update driver
3) No, not this time -> next
4) Install from a specifin location -> next
5) Don´t search I will choose... -> next
6) From the left box choose Intel and from the right scroll down until you meet this strange 82801FMB.... -> next

Thats it. This mysterious driver is hidden in your hard drive, don´t even try to search from Intel or Lenovo, you won´t find it from there, after this you will find the solution from here - my loved Thinkpad forum.

Q

PS. I am not a nerd and I didn´t even think of this "clean install" before this crash - where I lost a lot of valuable data But this must be some kind of act of God - because I have found that my system seems to work a lot faster now. I don´t understand why this is, because I have all the same software installed - expect "rescue" software. The strangest part is that my HD don´t click anymore. Are these HDD clicking and lack of speed symptoms caused by this "rescue and recovery" software???

Note from Moderator: Read the posting guidelines.

[notismed]

what about the solution for windows vista, i have vista, also have the same 82801FBM LPC Interface problem.

[carbon_unit]

Wow, That's quite a story.
If you read the forums and you will see that the recommended first step is to make a recovery disc set. There is a reason for that. Blank cd's cost less than $0.30 each, so you would have spent less than $2.10 to make the 7 cd recovery set that would have avoided all this hassle. You went through all that because you think it is not right to have a recovery set use 7 cd's??

The license key number on the bottom of your laptop is a Volume License number and will not work with the incorrect XP cd.

[ErikD]

Wow, That's quite a story.
If you read the forums and you will see that the recommended first step is to make a recovery disc set. There is a reason for that. Blank cd's cost less than $0.30 each, so you would have spent less than $2.10 to make the 7 cd recovery set that would have avoided all this hassle. You went through all that because you think it is not right to have a recovery set use 7 cd's??

The license key number on the bottom of your laptop is a Volume License number and will not work with the incorrect XP cd.

Actually the key on the laptop is an OEM key, and will work with any OEM edition CD. The one that is actually embedded in the OS install from the factory and a part of the recovery process is a volume key and will work only with volume license CDs.

[carbon_unit]

ErikD, you are correct. It's good to see that somebody around here is paying attention.