Failure to restore factory contents to C:

[bl0tt0]

I've installed a 100GB Seagate to my t42p, and I also plan to have linux running along side it. I used the recovery CDs I burnt immediately after receiving the machine, and things seem to go by perfectly fine, but in the process of testing the waters, I discovered that the HPA fails to restore to factory contents on the C:\ partition with an error saying something along the lines of failure to initialize recovery module. I checked to see whether the preloaded image actually was there by running a factory recovery from the preboot, and that ran without any problems. I know that the Rescue and Recovery program is supposed to be able to restore just the C:\ partition, as I have read this in the documentation, but it doesn't seem to want to do this in my case. Has anyone had a similar experience running Rescue and Recovery, or at least have an idea of what may be causing the problem?

Thank you

[Zeitgeist]

Try this:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62978

or this

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483

[bl0tt0]

Thank you for the links, but that isn't exactly the problem I am having. Perhaps I failed to explain it properly.

I have used the Rescue and Recovery disks I have burned to install the factory state system onto the Thinkpad. This process went through without a hitch. After the installation completes, I boot up into knoppix and use QTParted to resize the NTFS partition that contains Windows XP, then I use fdisk to create the partitions to which I will be installing linux. To make sure that I still have the full funtionality of RnR, I boot into the Predesktop environment in order to run the Restore to Factory Contents option. I go through the process there, and I am presented with the option of only formatting and installing to the C:\ partition, and I select that. I window pops up with an hourglass spinning for a minute or so, and then I receive an error that the IBM Recovery module failed to initialize, and I am dumped back to the RnR environment. I try this again, except this time, I choose to format the entire HD to install the preloaded OS. This runs without complaint.

I resized the C:\ to be about 30GB, so I don't see that as being the problem, and otherwise it works. I also know that I was able to do this on the HD that came with the Thinkpad, so I'm wondering why it's failing on me now.

Let me know if I need to provide any more potentially useful info.

Thank you

[Zeitgeist]

I think I understood your problem. The creation of partitions sometimes corrupts the MBR. R&R is very sensitive... Try the repair diskette.

I would also try to delete all parititions except C and would run the recovery again. If it fails again, delete ALL parititions, run the R&R CDs and use another partitioning software. I never had problems with acronis.

Good luck!

[bl0tt0]

Well, the recovery repair program presents its own problems as well, since I don't have a floppy drive to use with this machine. Perhaps using a USB thumb drive and changing the drive letter to A:\ would work?

I also still wonder whether it's an issue with the MBR, since anything wrong with that tends to screw up the ability to boot into the Recovery workspace. Granted, it is possible that that's the issue. I did note that the partition resizing tool in linux tends to change the hard disk geometry from 240 Heads and 63 Sectors to 255 Heads and 63 Sectors, but I didn't think that really mattered any more since most systems use LBA at this point anyways and everything else seems to handle this geometry change without any issues. I could be wrong, but it seems that the fact that it can do a full hard disk format and not a single partition format means that the issue lies somewhere else. Maybe because I'm using a hard disk that wasn't supplied by IBM or Lenovo?

[Zeitgeist]

Well, the recovery repair program presents its own problems as well, since I don't have a floppy drive to use with this machine. Perhaps using a USB thumb drive and changing the drive letter to A:\ would work?

Maybe because I'm using a hard disk that wasn't supplied by IBM or Lenovo?

Try this to create a bootable CD from a floppy image:
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html
extract the MBR repair software to this virtual floppy drive and burn a bootable CD therefrom.

No, only the t43 models have the bios check of the hdd, in any case you would have received a bios warnung in case you used a hdd not supported.

[w0qj]

Try deleting all partitions (and delete the HPA), and run your Factory Restore CD's to see if this works.

I suspect that Factory Restore assumes there's only C:\ partition and the HPA partitions only.
Perhaps anything more than that confuses the Factory Restore process, to the point that it's unbootable.


Please have a look at my related problem, as shared at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ht=#132658
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:05 am

[kam_]

I've had a similar problem myself. In the end i had to do a full recovery on the whole hard drive. Then i used partition magic to resize the partition then create a logical partition in the space.

I installed Linux to that logical partition and it all seemed to work ok. Even having two primary partitions (with the one not being used auto-hidden) didn't work. R&R crashed out or windows bluescreened.

Linux is quite unfussy about the partition it resides in, so its best to make windows happy first. Worst case if it refuses to boot to linux (on older bios's where the boundry is a problem) use a boot manager.

[bl0tt0]

Ok, I figured out the problem at least for me. Apparently the problem was the partition layout I had confused the RnR program. If you're going to install linux, just remember to put a primary partition between the C: partition and any the extended partition, at least of that's your plan. Otherwise RnR messes up somehow.

Thanks anyways for the help