Using the Recovery CDs

Message

jsteele · #1 Post by **jsteele** » Wed Jul 21, 2004 5:52 pm

I have a spare 80GB drive for my T-40 and I have the Recovery CD set. I want to create a 'fresh install' setup on the spare drive so I gathered up all the pieces and read the IBM doc on using the Recovery CD. I set the CD (actually DVD/CDRW) to be the first boot device the swapped out the hard drive and powered up.

The screen just gave me a cursor and stared back at me until I lost patience and shutdown. I tried all 4 CDs with the same result.

Can anyone enlighten me on the full procedure to run the Recovery CDs on a fresh drive? Thanks

3bqruk · #2 Post by **3bqruk** » Wed Jul 21, 2004 7:51 pm

sequence takes about a minute or so to start.Had same problems doing
a new HD install,was impatient and kept switching CDs thinking there was a problem.Patience is key...good luck.

jsteele · #3 Post by **jsteele** » Thu Jul 22, 2004 1:01 am

Thanks. Lack of patience I guess. I'll wait a little longer.

jsteele · #4 Post by **jsteele** » Thu Jul 22, 2004 9:43 pm

Still no joy.

Here's what I did step by step:
1. powered down
2. power up - enter BIOS
3. set "ATAPI CD0" as the first boot device
4. powered down
5. removed HDD
6. installed new blank HDD (80GB Hitachi, same geometry, speed, etc
as the original IBM TravelStar 80GB
7. power up with Thinkpad Recovery CD Disk 1 in the drive
8. waited ... and waited ... and waited ... went to the kitchen and made
a sandwich ... and waited .... and waited ...
9. Gave up and reinstalled the original HDD

Clearly I must be doing something wrong.

#5 Post by **jdhurst** » Thu Jul 22, 2004 10:51 pm

I had a similar problem when I upgraded my prior T30 to the 60Gb -7200rpm hard drive. I had to install the hard drive update and then it worked.

I think you also may have to consider that you have a bad set of recovery CD's. That, too, has happened to me (twice). But they would at least start to load, just that they would do the process incorrectly.
... JDHurst

jsteele · #6 Post by **jsteele** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 8:27 am

" think you also may have to consider that you have a bad set of recovery CD's"

I thought about that but I don't think so, it doesn't do anything, just sits there.

Zeitgeist · #7 Post by **Zeitgeist** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 9:14 am

I had once the same problem, a T23 did not want to boot from the first recovery CD.

It sounds strange, but what helped was that I deleted EVERY partition on the (new) hard disk (e.g. with fdisk), DELETE not formate before I run the recovery CDs.

jsteele · #8 Post by **jsteele** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 9:19 am

OK, I'll give that a try tonight. Hope springs eternal

Zeitgeist · #9 Post by **Zeitgeist** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 1:27 am

...and did it work finally?

jsteele · #10 Post by **jsteele** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 8:09 am

Nope.

But I spoke to IBM on Friday and they said I have the wrong CD set so they are sending a different one. We'll see how that goes.

jsteele · #11 Post by **jsteele** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 9:21 am

Good news, my replacement Recovery CD set came yesterday (Monday) OVERNIGHT shipping! Bad news, its exactly the same as the previous set! It SAYS its for the T40/T40P models 2373/2374 but my T40 is a 2379. The guy at IBM told me they are not the same (the PN is 01R8066 and he said I needed PN 01R8046) and he would make sure that I got the right set --- clearly he has no control over the shipping department

Oh, well, try again I guess. I stil have my doubts given that when I put the CD in the drive NOTHING happens, just a blinking cursor --- there is no evidence that it tries to read the drive but that could be illusory.

jsteele · #12 Post by **jsteele** » Tue Aug 03, 2004 2:41 pm

Well, I finally had some time to try the process with the replacement CD set and had the same results - no go.

So in the office today I tried an experiment using the original HDD. I put a bootable DOS CD in the drive and restarted --- booted to DOS right away. Then I put the Recovery Set CD 1 in the drive and booted and the recovery process started loading immediately. In both cases the original HDD is in the machine so I stopped the recovery process after verifying that it was at least loading.

Yet, with the new HDD in the machine nothing happens when I try booting from the Recovery CD set. I had already created a startup CD using "Rescue and Recovery with Rapid Restore" so I tried booting from that with the new HDD installed and got a big nothing. Similarly I tried booting with a USB HDD containing the Rescue and Recovery with Rapid Restore backups and got a blue screen of death after it started loading.

The only thing I have not tried yet is the new HDD and the bootable DOS CD --- I'll try that this evening --- but I suspect it isn't going to work either.

All of this kind of points to the new HDD being 'bad' somehow. But it has actually been used in this machine once before. I had used it in the second HDD adapter to backup using Ghost but I wasn't able to get the hidden install partition so I gave up that approach.

kjarrett · #13 Post by **kjarrett** » Tue Aug 03, 2004 5:18 pm

JSteele,

Do you by chance have a 2nd HDD adapter handy?

I am willing to bet that the problem is your drive has not been initialized. Not formatted - though that would also do the trick, as the drive has to be initialized to be formatted.

I have a 2nd HDD adapter for my T30. Every time I have had to Ghost onto a new drive, I have had to initialize it in the adapter using my working drive.

Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management

Initializing it makes it ready to be formatted, or in this case, restored.

If you have no other option, I'd be happy to initialize the drive for you in my T30 for free and send it back to you. All you'd have to do is include $ for the return shipping. If you're interested, PM me. And just so you don't think I'm a scammer, here's my ebay profile:

http://feedback.ebay.com/ws1/eBayISAPI. ... in_jarrett

-kj-

jsteele · #14 Post by **jsteele** » Tue Aug 03, 2004 6:07 pm

I do have the 2nd HDD adapter so I'll give that a try. thanks

jsteele · #15 Post by **jsteele** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 9:24 am

Last night I tried again and again it did not work. I cannot get ANY bootable CD (IBM recovery set CD or a plain DOS CD) to boot with the new HDD installed, yet it boots fine if the original HDD is installed.

I also tried putting the new HDD in the second HDD adapter and using "Rescue and Recovery with Rapid Restore" by booting from the USB HDD Rapid Restore backup. This booted and proceed to try to restore to the new HDD. However, it was anything but Rapid!

According to the display it was to take 186 minutes for less than 10GB --- it ended up running nearly 4 hours; for the FIRST part. immediately after it finished it it then displayed a message again that it was restoring and an estimated time of 24 minutes. 90 minutes later, when it had been sitting on "100% done, 0 seconds remaining" for 20 minutes.

After stopping it I tried booting from the new HDD and got bupkis! By now it was 3AM so I put the original HDD back in and went to bed!

kjarrett · #16 Post by **kjarrett** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 9:41 am

JSteele,

Put the 80gb'er in the 2nd HDD adapter.

Boot normally.

Go into Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management and initialize the drive. BE SURE YOU ARE INITIALIZING THE RIGHT DRIVE! If you want, go ahead and format it as FAT32 or NTFS, I don't think it will matter, the restore process should redo it anyway.

Power down.

Put the 80gb in your primary HD slot.

Boot with the recovery CD.

Let us know how it goes!

-kj-

jsteele · #17 Post by **jsteele** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 10:19 am

I guess I forgot to mention that I had done that first and it didn't make any difference.

kjarrett · #18 Post by **kjarrett** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 10:45 am

Indeed ... bummer! Sorry it didn't help.

JHEM · #19 Post by **JHEM** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 11:02 am

jsteele wrote:I guess I forgot to mention that I had done that first and it didn't make any difference.

Could you have perhaps set the HD jumper to SLAVE??

Did you set the primary partition as ACTIVE?

You're really stumping me with this one and it's beginning to pi*s me off!

If you wanted to send the HD to my northern neighbor Keith or to me let one of us know.

Regards,

James

jsteele · #20 Post by **jsteele** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 11:23 am

"it's beginning to pi*s me off! "

You!

No, the drive has no jumpers set. Yes, I tried setting the partition active.

But if you think about why would that be necessary using Rescue and Recovery to rebuild a system. One reason why you would want to rebuild is because you drive is fried and you have to start from scratch. One (at least I) would 'think' that the recovery process would start and work properly with an clean 'out-of-the-bag' drive.

By now surely IBM has gotten beyond Microsoft's 'you've-got-to-have-DOS-to-install-advanced-operating-systems' syndrome.**

I guess I just have to keep trying things until I figure out waht is happening. Any other ideas gratefully accepted.

-------------------------
** This reminds me of when I started in the computer racket. I was working at Eastern Air Lines brand new reservations system, one of the largest non-governmental computer installations in the world. It was a gigantic multiple IBM System 360 based TPF (called ACP at the time) operation with acres of disk drives --- not much disk space but acres of disk drives. The [censored] thing had to have a working punch card reader or you couldn't run it!

tselling · #21 Post by **tselling** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 12:09 pm

Do you have the latest BIOS/Embedded controller installed for the machine. If not I would try that. Also reinitallizing the bios to its defaults is often not a bad idea after updating the Bios/embedded controller.

jsteele · #22 Post by **jsteele** » Wed Aug 04, 2004 12:26 pm

Yep, absolutely up to date and reinitialized to defaults -- the only change was to move the boot order for the CD as instructed by IBM in the recovery CD instructions...

Using the Recovery CDs

Using the Recovery CDs

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