running Product Recovery

[Dutch]

OK, I feel like a real dunce with this question, but I've never done this before. I just put a new HDD in my T41. Old one crapped out earlier this week. I've got my rescue and recovery, and product recovery disks. I put in the R&R disk, it did its thing. I then chose to restore factory contents, and it called for the six product recovery disks each in turn. Then it wanted to restart. I said OK.

When it restarts, though, it brings me back into the Rescue and Recovery shell, and I can't figure out what to do next! How do I get back to XP? I've tried everything in the R&R shell, but nothing seems to do the trick. I've poked at IBM help, but am not getting what I want.

It's got to be the simplest thing, and I would be grateful if someone would point me to it.


THANKS

[tfflivemb2]

Just curious, did you remove the CD from the drive?

[Dutch]

Yup, there's no CD in the drive.

[GomJabbar]

I just did this recently. IIRC you have to go to the menu to restore Factory Contents. The first time you are copying everything to the hard drive, but Windows still isn't installed. When you boot up after using the discs, you are booting into the rescue and recovery partition on the hard disc as opposed to booting up in it from the CD. When you choose to restore factory contents the second time, it does everything from the hard drive.

[Dutch]

Thanks very much, GomJabbar. That did the trick! I just wasn't clueing in to that at all.

So now I'm back to square one and re-setting up all my stuff.

I know this has been dealt with before, and I see lots of related threads, but there are a couple of things about rescue and recovery that aren't clear to me. If anyone can point me to any relatively simple and complete step-by-steps for this on the forum, I'd appreciate it. Here are the questions:

-given the fact that I need to plan on HDD failure, what's the BEST way of providing for that problem in the future? i.e., as it is now, I'm back to factory specs, but I've got hours of tweaking and setup to do to get it back to near where I had it. I know R&R can partition part of the hard drive and put a mirror of the setup there, but that seems sort of laughably useless in the case of HDD failure. Is there a way to capture your settings and then store all that elsewhere?

-Are these 7 Rescue/Recovery disks that I made 18 months ago, when I first bought the machine, the only thing that stand between me and a useless dead laptop some day? i.e., if the disks are somehow rendered unusable, how does one revive one's TP?

Again, thanks VERY much.

[GomJabbar]

Once you use the disks, you can create a new Product Recovery Disc Set. You can use 7 CD's, or 1 CD for the first disk and 1 DVD for the second disk.

You can use Rescue and Recovery to back up to a USB hard drive, or to DVD's or CD's. I personally just decided to get a ThinkPad 2nd HDD Adapter for Ultrabay Slim (T40), FRU 62P4554. It costs about $50 and comes with cloning software. You just have to buy a 2.5" laptop hard drive to put in it. I bought an equivalent 40GB Fujitsu drive from Newegg for $68.

Copy backups to a CD drive, DVD drive, USB hard disk drive, or network drive. If your computer has access to a network drive, a USB hard disk drive, or a recordable DVD or CD drive, Rapid Restore Ultra enables you to copy backup files to these devices, thus providing an additional level of protection. These devices can then be used to restore the contents of the hard disk in the event of a hard disk drive failure. For information on how to perform this function, see Copying backups from the hard drive.

Back up directly to a CD drive, DVD drive, USB hard disk drive, or network drive. If your computer has access to a network drive, a USB hard disk drive, or a recordable DVD or CD drive, Rapid Restore Ultra enables you to back up files directly to these devices, thus providing an additional level of protection. These devices can then be used to restore the contents of the hard disk in the event of a hard disk drive failure. For information on how to perform this function, see Backing up now.

Note: Backup files that are backed up directly to CD or DVD can be restored using the IBM Rescue and Recovery environment. Backup files that are copied to CD or DVD can be restored directly from the Windows interface.

Note that Rescue and Recovery takes a long time to make a backup to DVD's or CD's. I used Stomp Backup MyPC before, and it took less than half of the time. Also Rescue and Recovery does not do a verify after the backup - something that Backup MyPC does. I expect the cloning operation to go much quicker (I am still waiting on the shipment). Also, with a clone, if your hard drive fails, you just swap drives and keep going.

EDIT: Rapid Restore Ultra 4.0 is part of Rescue and Recovery 2.0. If you have a newer version of Rescue and Recovery, you won't see Rapid Restore Ultra, but the features are basically the same. Rescue and Recovery 3.0 has some additional features, but I decided not to install it again after restoring my factory contents. I do not plan to use Rescue and Recovery backups anyway.

[Dutch]

Thanks again, GomJabbar. I plan to get the TP tweaked just the way I want then run Rescue and Recovery to a USB hard drive. I'll also create the extra set of Product Recovery disks. Then nothing bad will ever happen to me again!

[pae77]

. . . . I expect the cloning operation to go much quicker (I am still waiting on the shipment). Also, with a clone, if your hard drive fails, you just swap drives and keep going.

When I clone my 60 gig 72k rpm drive to an identical drive in the ultrabay, it takes about 40 minutes. One thing to note about that IBM provided EZ Gig software is that regardless of the amount of data on the primary drive, you cannot clone to a drive that physically has less capacity than the primary drive. So if your 40 gig drive you are intending to use for backup is smaller than your primary drive, you will not be able to use EZ Gig, however, in this situation Acronis True image works as long as the data will fit on the target drive.

[Dutch]

new problem!:

I did a fresh install from the Product Recovery disks, tweaked the heck out of it, made all my favorite settings, added a bunch of software.

Then, I restarted it later and nearly all my setting changes that I had made were gone! i.e., back to out-of-the-box (nearly, but not completely). The software I had added was, I THINK, mostly still there, but the shortcuts I had placed on the desktop were gone, and the internal changes I had made to some of that software (like resetting the homepage in firefox) were gone.

I'm perfectly willing to admit that this is due to something I did in my tweaking, but what?? Most of my tweaks aren't major. I turn off sounds, I kill the Norton and add AVG, I change the appearance, fix fonts, I turn off the need for user to log in. The most "invasive" thing is that I make a little fix in the registry to "disable notification area balloon tips" because they make me crazy. But that's a safe fix that I've made plenty of times before with no problem.

This is freaking me out a little. Why is the system reverting this way on restart?

MANY THANKS for any help or ideas.

[GomJabbar]

Try using Windows System Restore to get back to a time when you didn't experience this problem.

EDIT: Before you try the above, you could try "Last known good configuration". Press F8 when you see the IBM Logo screen to get to the Windows boot options menu. Choose Last known good configuration.

The problem you are having I believe is caused by Windows not shutting down cleanly. It boots up to a cached copy which doesn't have the latest changes. You can try UPHClean Service from Microsoft to help resolve User Profile Hive closing issues.

[Dutch]

Thanks again, GomJabbar.

I will poke around on this later today, following your recommendations, and report results.

As of right now, it seemed to hold my last changes (after most recent shut down and reboot). But yeah, I've got to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks.

[Dutch]

Turns out it's a user account issue. I don't know what happened, but it created two admin accounts, one called administrator, and the other with my name, which it what I put in at setup. It looks as though the boot-up that was freaking me out was the one that was coming up as administrator, rather than the one I had tweaked all to hell, which was the one under my name. Why would the main account suddenly switch to "administrator" rather then the one I'd been setting up?

If you haven't guessed by now, I'm not much of a computer operator. I appreciate your patience and advice.

[Dutch]

one thing I did do that may be related to the seemingly spontaneous user account switch. I did this:

Start > Run, then type CONTROL USERPASSWORDS2. On the dialog box, deselect "users must enter a user name and password to use this computer."

Maybe that caused it to go to the Administrator account by default?? Although, I swear I've used this setting before without complications.