IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system

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S P · #1 Post by **S P** » Wed May 10, 2006 7:37 pm

Has anybody gotten this error while trying to run the product recovery, restore factory defaults?

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/stevtecv6 ... C02844.JPG

This is on a T42 (2378-FVU). Awhile ago the drive was doing the click of death which I guess was pretty common on this machine. Windows was crashing a lot and eventually it just quit. I tried the recovery option but it gave the above error. I figured the drive was just toast. Didn't have time to deal with it at the time and had a 2 spare laptops so I just used those.

Fast forward 6 months, losing the use of my 1 spare which is for work and very fast. And my other one is just pathetically slow now and the main battery is gone too. Time to restore the T42!

Finally trying to recover it. Called support and had them send me a new drive and all the recovery CDs. Drive works, no clicking!

, and it did the whole thing where it copies all of the files to the hard drive which confirms everything seems to be working hardware wise. So the CD -> HD restore works, but now when it's trying to do the HD ghost partition to live HD partition restore it does the same thing!! When it boots off of the hard drive into the rapid restore stuff and I click on "restore factory contents" I STILL get the same "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system" error message.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGHGGHHGHH!!!

What gives? Any clues on this one? I tried it again and again, and on about the 3rd or 4th go round now it's just sitting saying "Processing Please wait...", for about the past 30-45 mins. No HD activity, just sitting there. I thought it might have been doing some partition stuff but this is way too long.

Thanks for any help!

Steve

Note: For images over 50KB, please post either a warning in the post title or leave it as a link; Thanks

-Wolf

nirvana0001 · #2 Post by **nirvana0001** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:00 pm

is it possible that HDD defective?

S P · #3 Post by **S P** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:17 pm

nirvana0001 wrote:is it possible that HDD defective?

The new HDD that they just sent me is what's in there now, and it's still giving the same error message. I suppose it could be bad also, but I think it has to be something else. I mean, it runs, the BIOS sees it, and it manages to do the CD backup to HD ghost partition copying without a problem, and it doesn't click!

#4 Post by **GomJabbar** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:29 pm

I did this recently on my T42, and it went without a hitch. I would suggest checking the following:

1) In the BIOS set up menu, make sure the security for the Predesktop Area is set to Normal.

2) IIRC, after you insert the last CD of the Product Recovery Disc set and it has copied the data from it, remove the CD before you reboot. You will again be brought up to the Rescue and Recovery menu. Choose to restore factory contents again, and this time it will restore from your hard drive.

S P · #5 Post by **S P** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:49 pm

GomJabbar wrote:I did this recently on my T42, and it went without a hitch. I would suggest checking the following:

1) In the BIOS set up menu, make sure the security for the Predesktop Area is set to Normal.

2) IIRC, after you insert the last CD of the Product Recovery Disc set and it has copied the data from it, remove the CD before you reboot. You will again be brought up to the Rescue and Recovery menu. Choose to restore factory contents again, and this time it will restore from your hard drive.

Yeah I went and scrubbed the BIOS for anything and saw the Predesktop area security thing, and it was already set to normal so no problem there.

After I got through the last CD I did leave it in there, but it isn't bootable so no big deal. But I thought it was so when it came up to the restore menu with the restore factory contents thing by default (pre-selected) I actually hit cancel because I thought it had booted off of the CD. Took the CD out, realized it hadn't booted off of that anyways, and then rebooted, the restore factory defaults option was not pre-selected and waiting for your ok this time though. So I just selected it myself and got the above error, again. Don't think that would have screwed it up, but you never know I guess.

I decided to start over and do the whole CD-HDD copy process over again and this time I'll do it right. The "destructions" say to wait for a prompt to take the CD out but I never got one, so I left it in!

I know for a fact that factory restore has worked just fine on this thing before. I ran it once or twice without a hitch, except for the last time on the old HDD when I first got that error, which is when I figured the ghost image was toasted or whatever. But now I'm still getting it, so what the heck changed?

Between the first one or two restores I did and the last one, I'm pretty sure I did update the firmware and BIOS. Could that have anything to do with it? Maybe I have a bugged BIOS or something on my machine that isn't cooperating with the factory restore? That seems like the most likely candidate to me, but hopefully that's not it.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

S P · #6 Post by **S P** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:57 pm

Okay I just got through the whole sequence yet again, and did everything exactly when I should have and I still get the same stupid error. WTF.

BIOS version: 1RETDIWW (3.14)
BIOS date: 01/20/2005

I bet anything it's a bug in this stupid BIOS version. I'm probably gonna have to send the thing back. Back to the phone again, LOL!

#7 Post by **GomJabbar** » Wed May 10, 2006 9:35 pm

IIRC, I had upgraded to BIOS version 3.19 by the time I restored factory contents. I am at BIOS version 3.20 now. It's possible that I was at BIOS version 3.20 at the time I restored factory contents, but it seems I updated the BIOS once after restoring factory contents.

I don't know if this could be the case, but your Product Recovery Discs probably have Rescue and Recovery 2.0 on them. AFAIK, RnR 2.0 used the PARTIES or HPA for the service partition. This is a somewhat complex setup. It involves the BIOS and the hard drive. Perhaps if the hard drive you have cannot be fully controlled by the BIOS to create the PARTIES or HPA area, maybe that is your problem. This is only speculation on my part.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/HPA

Another thought. Try disabling the Predesktop Area in the BIOS, then boot off of a Windows Install CD and delete all partitions on the hard disk. Now set the Predesktop Area security in the BIOS back to Normal, then try to restore factory contents again off of the CD's.

BTW, I have a 2378-5UU T42. IIRC, this has the same specs as yours except it came with 256 MB RAM instead of 512 MB, and the warranty is only 1 year. I have the ATI Radeon 9000 graphics adapter and the Intel 2200 BG WiFi adapter.

S P · #8 Post by **S P** » Wed May 10, 2006 10:08 pm

I don't have a bootable XP CD, but I do have bootable Win2k CDs so I tried that after disabling that predesktop security area setting. All I saw was about a 4 GB FAT32 partition, which I deleted through 2k setup. After that, 38154 MB left of unpartitioned space on a "40 GB" drive. Not sure if that's right or not, but that's all it sees.

Got off the phone with IBM phone support for the 3rd time in 2 days, and this time I talked to SW Thinkvantage support. The guy thinks that one of the CDs were bad. I don't buy that at all and subtley let him know that, but they're sending me yet another package of CDs to try, and if that doesn't work then I get to send the thing back in for them to figure out what the heck is going on and they'll reimage my drive properly while they're at it too.

Hopefully all this can get done by next Friday, otherwise I'm going to have to take my old slooooooowwww Toshiba with me on a trip and it's not gonna be pretty. You know I'm tempted to just install 2k on this thing and then do the XP upgrade, and then install the IBM tools on top of that, but I guess that'd get pretty messy. Or I could hook up an external USB FDD, boot XP off of XP boot disks which I have, and then load XP directly. Hmmm... For some reason my XP CD's aren't bootable.

God, what a PITA this is.

S P · #9 Post by **S P** » Tue May 16, 2006 2:27 pm

Well I got the 2nd set of recovery CDs and guess what, that wasn't the issue of course because it had the same error at the same spot all over again, so I sent the thing back in. Got it back today, plugged it in, and guess what? It's still not booting into Windows even after I checked off the thing to pretty please reimage the hard drive.

It gets better... I tried to run the restore factory defaults thing from the recovery menu (booting off the HD) and this time it doesn't even get as far as it did before. It gives a "parser" error and then quits. So they sent me back a PC that still does not even boot. Ridiculous.

As far as I can tell, the only thing they did is update the BIOS from 3.14 to 3.16 and sent it straight back to me, still not booting.

So now I'm running through the big restore process from the CDs for like the 4th or 5th time, only on the new BIOS. If this doesn't work there's going to be hell to pay. You'd think they'd have at least sent me back a PC that boots into windows that I can use, but apparently not.

Fast shipping through DHL though, usually one day. Dropped it in a DHL drop box on Friday afternoon and it's already back on Tuesday afternoon, albeit not working.

S P · #10 Post by **S P** » Tue May 16, 2006 4:22 pm

Ridiculous... product recovery process failed again after the CDs this time with a different error. "Product Recovery Process unable to initiate convertion process"

According to IBM tech, they actually replaced the motherboard and apparently just sent it right back out the door, did not even check to see if it would boot into Windows or if the actual "PROBLEM" was fixed, and did not even reimage the hard drive. I asked if I could get a bootable Windows XP CD since the recovery system was clearly not working and the guy chuckled at me. I knew this was asking for trouble.

This will definitely be my last IBM notebook.

egibbs · #11 Post by **egibbs** » Tue May 16, 2006 6:19 pm

I have had problems restoring before that were solved by doing a "Full Erase HDD" from PC Doctor.

Ed Gibbs

t20user · #12 Post by **t20user** » Wed May 17, 2006 3:16 pm

I was just recently shipped a replacement HDD and recovery CD set for my T41 and it puked after the 1st CD. I decided to run the full system check in PC Doctor and it said the DVD drive was bad. It had problems reading certain sectors. You might want to try running the PC Doctor full check, it is pretty complete.

DIGITALgimpus · #13 Post by **DIGITALgimpus** » Wed May 17, 2006 6:11 pm

I had a set of bad CD's do that to me.

bilalmuddassir · #14 Post by **bilalmuddassir** » Thu May 18, 2006 8:48 pm

Can you help me out?
I have missing 7th recovery disk. I don't know what to do. I ran the recovery procedure and system is idling.

S P wrote:Has anybody gotten this error while trying to run the product recovery, restore factory defaults?

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/stevtecv6 ... C02844.JPG

This is on a T42 (2378-FVU). Awhile ago the drive was doing the click of death which I guess was pretty common on this machine. Windows was crashing a lot and eventually it just quit. I tried the recovery option but it gave the above error. I figured the drive was just toast. Didn't have time to deal with it at the time and had a 2 spare laptops so I just used those.

Fast forward 6 months, losing the use of my 1 spare which is for work and very fast. And my other one is just pathetically slow now and the main battery is gone too. Time to restore the T42!

Finally trying to recover it. Called support and had them send me a new drive and all the recovery CDs. Drive works, no clicking! , and it did the whole thing where it copies all of the files to the hard drive which confirms everything seems to be working hardware wise. So the CD -> HD restore works, but now when it's trying to do the HD ghost partition to live HD partition restore it does the same thing!! When it boots off of the hard drive into the rapid restore stuff and I click on "restore factory contents" I STILL get the same "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system" error message.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGHGGHHGHH!!!

What gives? Any clues on this one? I tried it again and again, and on about the 3rd or 4th go round now it's just sitting saying "Processing Please wait...", for about the past 30-45 mins. No HD activity, just sitting there. I thought it might have been doing some partition stuff but this is way too long.

Thanks for any help!

Steve

Note: For images over 50KB, please post either a warning in the post title or leave it as a link; Thanks -Wolf

S P · #15 Post by **S P** » Fri May 19, 2006 10:41 pm

Got the T42 back again today, and again it doesn't work. Now it boots into Windows (progress!

) but all it does is either crash or BSOD with completely random errors. So, yet again I call up service and they want me to send it in yet again for the 3rd time, but after getting my PC back twice and having it still not work twice, I cut the guy off and told them to just give me a new [* MODERATOR EDIT*] Watch the language laptop since they obviously can't fix this one.

Yeah, so I escalated it and some guy reviewed all my trouble tickets, and was told that somebody would be in contact with me by next Wednesday about an "exception", which I assume in IBM terminology means giving somebody a whole new laptop instead of fixing the existing one. Like an IBM lemon law, heh.

Anyways, this is just completely stupid now. Getting your laptop back once and having it still not work is stupid. Getting it back twice and having it still not work is inexcusable. All they are doing is slapping some parts in it and praying it works, and then sending it straight back to customers without even testing them.

This laptop has been well cared for, has never been dropped, abused, neglected, had liquid spilled on it, or anything. Ironically, before this I had a T41 that abruptly quit on me on day 27 of the 30 day return policy. Processor nuked itself. I should have taken the hint back then...

So, the saga continues.

pae77 · #16 Post by **pae77** » Sat May 20, 2006 8:55 am

I've had some problems over the years with the three TP's I've owned, including one that needed a motherboard replacement, but nothing like what you've experienced. Can understand how irritating this is, but I suspect they will shortly make it right for you.

I wouldn't reject the entire brand because of a problem like this. I really don't think there is anything better out there, especially in the customer service department. If you don't trust the mail in service after this, (and I wouldn't blame you for that), you could always pay a little extra for the warranty that provides on site service.

Still curious to hear how this ordeal works out in the end.

szymon · #17 Post by **szymon** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 3:17 am

Hi there,

I received exactly this same error yesterday on a T60. Now, this particular T60 had had Linux installed on it for a while, and for various reasons I needed the machine back to running Windows (lets not get into the religious war. I describe these things in terms of preferences like Myers Briggs; I have a strong preference for Linux but that doesn't mean that I don't use Windows under stress).

First of all, I had to get the RR partition to boot. The Linux I had been using was Fedora Core 5, and Grub had been installed on the Master Boot Record, so my "F11" option had vanished. I booted the machine into the Grub command line, and looked at the disk using the 'geometry' option. The first partition on the disk (hd0,0) was of type 0x83 (linux ext3), and the second partition (hd0,1) was of type 0x07 ("compaq rescue"), so I figured I need to boot into the second one. I typed:

unhide (hd0,1)
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
boot

and woo woo, the RR console loaded. So, I went to restore, it said "do you want to wipe all the other partitions on the disk or just the C: partition", I told it to wipe them all, and boom - after 25 seconds I got the error message described in this post, "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system". Arrrrgh.

So I played with it for a while, and no matter what I did I couldn't get it to work. I tried setting the disk up to its original factory settings, by creating a single NTFS partition (also tried FAT), even went to the extent of creating a file system on the partition, and nothing - every single time I got the same message, just a frustrating failure and nothing more. Oh dear.

Finally I tried to use the 'root (hd0,1)' instead of rootnoverify in the grub command line, and it came back and told me that it can't mount the partition as it is an unknown type. That gave me a clue - so I tried to boot by tweaking the partition type using grub:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
parttype (hd0,1) 0x0b
chainloader +1
boot

And this time, boom - the restore worked just fine! 0x0b is the partition type for Windows 98 FAT, which is what the file system on the RR partition is. I restored Windows to factory settings, fixed the MBR to boot the RR partition correctly and tried again - and once again it gave me the "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system" error! So then I used linux fdisk (via a knoppix CD) to switch the partition type to 0x0b, tried again and boom it worked just fine.

So the moral of this story is, check the partition type that the RR partition is being created as. If it's a 0x07 partition type, change it to 0x0b and hopefully the problem will go away.

Oh, finally a word about changing the MBR. Not being Windows inclined, I don't own a Windows CD, so I couldn't use the Windows recovery console to fix the Master Boot Record. After a lot of searching, I found mbrfix.exe (download from http://www.sysint.no/en/Download.aspx) and mbrfixgui.exe (download from http://www.autoitscript.com/fileman/use ... fixgui.exe). The two of these together fixed my MBR without even having to reboot the machine.

Hope that's of use to someone.

-simon

S P · #18 Post by **S P** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 9:25 am

Happy 4th everybody!

Well, over a month later and this piece of crap STILL is not fixed. It's taken awhile because I've been in the middle of moving, they sent an empty return box to my former address which got delayed so I wasn't there to pick it up (out of state move) and I just didn't feel like dealing with it until an IBM rep called me a few weeks later. Anyways....

3 times this POS has been sent back to IBM now, and 3 times has been returned not quite in full 100% working order. Just to recap...

- was originally sent new HD, but had no image, and I had no recovery CDs
- was sent recovery CDs, and got the error in the title of this thread
- was sent another recovery CD set, and same deal
- returned laptop, was sent back with new motherboard and BIOS still with no image, would not even boot!
- returned laptop again, was properly imaged, but did nothing but crash and bluescreen
- returned again, now no Windoze BSODs (yet) but apps still crash left and right.

The repair depot manager supposedly oversaw repair of this thing the last time, and they've put about 3 new motherboards in it from what I can tell, but it's still not working. It does work "somewhat" this time and at least you can get into windows for now, but everything just crashes sooner or later. Internet Explorer crashed the first time I loaded it. Firefox crashes all the time. On boot I get a windows service pack has encountered an error message most of the time. I also get corrupt file warnings when extracting zips that work perfectly fine on my other laptop. I could not install the java runtime environment from a known good zip for example, and had to download a new one which also had "corrupt" files. yeah right... My favorite was when I tried to load firefox and it didn't run so I went into the taskmanager to see if it was there and try to end task it. The freakin Task Manager crashed, and then the Dr Watson postmortem crash analyzer or something crashed trying to analyze the Task manager crash! Occasionally apps will hang at 100% CPU utilization and normally an end task in tskmgr will fix that, but not anymore - they just hang and the only way to fix it is to reboot. Last night it hung on shut down also and I had to force a shutdown by holding the power key for 10 secs. LOL

After 3+ new motherboards and still having the same trouble, I'd have to say that obviously the motherboards aren't the problem and that it's something in the chassis itself. I have no clue how these things are constructed internally, but maybe there's some sort of grounding fault, EMI issue, or other electrical issue within the chassis itself that causes this sort of nonsense. The only way to "fix" it is to just give me a whole new laptop!

So anyways, this piece of crap is just completely hosed. IBM can't fix it, their stupid recovery CDs don't work, and I'm demanding a new laptop once again. I'm typing on it now through firefox, but it's only a matter of time before Firefox crashes, again. This laptop has been well cared for, has never been dropped, abused, or had anything spilled on it and this has just been a total let down.

Now here is something I noticed way back, like a year ago. When I first got this thing, the system current while using the laptop in the most conservative energy mode was about 0.68-0.73A. As time went on I noticed that it would never really go down below 1.00A and that's about the time I started having weird crashes. Maybe there's something weird in the chassis causing something to short or at least draw high current that causes a brown out sort of situation and then memory read/write errors and lots of crashing.

Anyways, it's still drawing 1.00+A at all times and never goes down into the low sub-1.0A range even right now. If I knew what a "normal" T42 motherboard was supposed to look like on a thermal imager cam, I could take this piece of crap into work and point our thermal cam at it and see if I could find an abnormally hot part to track down the problem, but since it's under warranty this is IBM's problem and not mine. I'm just tired of dealing with this...

/rant again

S P · #19 Post by **S P** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 12:30 pm

pae77 wrote:I wouldn't reject the entire brand because of a problem like this. I really don't think there is anything better out there, especially in the customer service department. If you don't trust the mail in service after this, (and I wouldn't blame you for that), you could always pay a little extra for the warranty that provides on site service.

Still curious to hear how this ordeal works out in the end.

I've had 4 laptops either for work or personal (2 IBMs, a Dell, and a Toshiba). ALL of them have been pieces of crap except for the first I had which was a Toshiba. It's still running just fine as my backup. I definitely love the design of the IBM the best (blows the others out of the water), but that means nothing when product quality is questionable, software is flukey and doesn't work like it's supposed to (recovery CDs, among other things), and the service dept cannot repair the thing under warranty, and even send it back to me still not working or not even tested properly. Gee thanks for sending my laptop back to me 3 times still not working properly.

I won't be buying another laptop both because I really don't need the capabilities of one anymore, and because of just plain bad luck with them. My Blackberry 8700c that I just got does 90% of what I'd use a laptop for anyways. If I did buy another laptop though, I guarantee you it wouldn't be an IBM. If the product quality and reliability was top-notch it wouldn't matter how incompetent the service department was. Or even if the product quality was sub-par, a top-notch service department can make up for that. From where I'm standing though, product quality is both poor and the service dept is inefficient, and that is a deadly combination.

I'll be going back to a desktop of some sort eventually for main PC needs, and will use my Blackberry for mobile needs.

S P · #20 Post by **S P** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 12:36 pm

szymon wrote:Hi there,

I received exactly this same error yesterday on a T60. Now, this particular T60 had had Linux installed on it for a while, and for various reasons I needed the machine back to running Windows (lets not get into the religious war. I describe these things in terms of preferences like Myers Briggs; I have a strong preference for Linux but that doesn't mean that I don't use Windows under stress).

Lol, ENTJ here although I strongly prefer socionics to MBTI. I tested as about 3 or 4 different types with MBTI until I finally realized I was something totally different with the help of socionics. I like Linux but too much of a learning curve and not enough time to fiddle with it to get to where I'd need to be. My hax0r days are long over.

Too bad IBM doesn't give you a bootable XP CD, otherwise I'd try some things. I'm tempted to break out an old bootable Win2k CD just to see if a bare install would be stable to isolate the hardware and that it's not some sort of weird software issue with IBM's images. I have a strong hunch it's some sort of weird H/W issue anyways though.

I'm fed up with Windoze enough that I'll probably go to an alternative OS on the next go round anyways. If IBM can't fix this piece of crap T42 it'll be sooner rather than later. One of these new Macs with the capability to run windoze when needed are very tempting...

S P · #21 Post by **S P** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 2:57 pm

I checked that suspected high current drain thing and it didn't pan out. It dropped into the 0.7xA range after a few mins even with the wireless on so looks like that theory is a bust

Btw, I'm replying via my blackberry right now. These things are great

Troels · #22 Post by **Troels** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 10:47 am

Hi,

When reading through your posts i'm thinking that the memory / RAM is at fault.
I have had memory go bad, even though it was well cared for and never overclocked, and ran in comfortable temperature ranges.

It's particularly bad of them to obviously not testing the machine, a motherboard is an expensive part, so it would be easy for them to check that it was not the issue.

Burn a CD-R with the iso from http://www.memtest86.com and boot from it. Scanning/testing will take some time...

#23 Post by **GomJabbar** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 3:06 pm

Troels wrote:Hi,

When reading through your posts i'm thinking that the memory / RAM is at fault.
I have had memory go bad, even though it was well cared for and never overclocked, and ran in comfortable temperature ranges.

Makes sense. I have had memory issues prevent an OS install. In fact, when I installed OS/2 some years ago, I had to temporarily disable the cache memory during the install. I was able to turn it back on afterwards.

If you have more than one stick of memory installed, try removing the second stick, then use the Product Recovery Discs again.

S P · #24 Post by **S P** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 9:15 am

Yeah I already thought of that. The on-board 256M gets swapped out with each motherboard (replaced 3x times) and I tried removing my 256M expander and the system would still crash and behave the same way with or without the expansion memory.

Anyways, just got a call from IBM and they're going to replace my laptop, at last.

S P · #25 Post by **S P** » Mon Jul 31, 2006 12:33 pm

FINAL UPDATE

My replacement system is finally here as of last Wednesday, a brand new T60 (2007-4AU). The T42 is now officially property of IBM/Lenovo , so it'll be sent back this week sometime.

2007-4AU specs:

- Core Duo T2400 (1.83 GHz)
- 512 MB RAM
- 14.1" SXGA+
- 64 MB graphics memory
- 60 GB 5400rpm HD
- DVD/CD-RW combo drive
- Intel 802.11a/b/g
- fingerprint reader

It's nice to have a working and fully up-to-date laptop again, and the "Dedicated Resolution Owner" from IBM's "Client Satisfaction and Loyalty Project Office" was a great help and always very responsive, sometimes even replying to emails well after hours. So it's great to finally get some satisfaction. I guess I feel like a new car owner who finally got their "lemon" replaced and is in a brand new car on somebody else's dime.

Anyways, as far as this whole thread, I'm guessing that this was a hardware problem all along. I started to get crashes and corrupt file warnings in the first place because of the problem, which I thought was originally a crashed hard drive. Then I couldn't restore the laptop from the CD's or the on-board image because of the same problem. And then I still got all sorts of crashes, blue screens, and corrupt file warnings after multiple motherboard replacements and BIOS updates because of the same problem. If I had to make a guess, I'd say "the problem" was some sort of chassis ground plane issue, or some other sort of EMI issue that was causing the motherboard or system as a whole to not function properly. Could have been some funky display EMI issue too I guess. So if you have some sort of grounding or EMI issue that's preventing the system from reading/writing properly, nothing else is going to work anyways. Not sure if they ever actually replaced the Pentium-M processor itself, but I suppose that could have fried itself partially also. I guess when the product recovery stuff was doing its thing it checked to make sure that what it intended to write had been written correctly, found that it had not (due to hardware issues) and then crapped out with the error. Either way, very strange, and I'm glad it's out of my hands.

Thanks to all for the support, suggestions, and help here. Guess I'll be surfing the T60 forum now.

Steve

agarza · #26 Post by **agarza** » Thu Aug 17, 2006 8:17 am

My T42P have the same error:
"IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system"

I'm having freezes with the GPU overheating, the woman who sold me the laptop (who used to work @ IBM) told me that my model was produced with a wrong fan, and because there was no good heat dissipation it would crash.

She provided me with copies of the Recovery CD's but I have been unable to restore my system. Is then that error due to a hardware malfunction?

nyphot · #27 Post by **nyphot** » Wed May 28, 2008 11:47 am

I have a similar (but different?) problem on my T43. If anyone can assist, it'd be most appreciated!

In the quest for more disk space, I created recovery discs and then deleted the HPA. Last week I bought a new HDD and tried to set that to "factory default." Everything went smoothly for a while, but on processing the file "3gyum1a1.imz", the process abruptly stopped and reported "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system." I've tried a couple of times it always fails at exactly the same place (after copying all files from CDs, rebooting, and then processing... and about 6 minutes (3/4 progress bar) into the processing). I called IBM, but don't want to fork over $50 for new CDs... especially since I think there was a verification step on my CDs so they SHOULD be good...

Some things that are unusual about my setup: I updated the BIOS to the most recent version, I'm installing on a 120GB HD (from the supported list)... I can't see why this would affect things though.

Any thoughts?

CeNG · #28 Post by **CeNG** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 4:44 pm

I just ran a factory restore on my system (T61p) and got the same "failed to update" error.

The solution for me was to remove the sata drive I had in the drive bay and replace it with the optical drive that my system came with. Maybe the factory restore requires the factory hardware in order to run correctly, or maybe it just requires an optical drive for some reason (though that would make even less sense).

sparta.rising · #29 Post by **sparta.rising** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 6:37 pm

I'm tearing my hair out on this one. I'm getting the same "Ibm product recovery failed to restore your system." error.

I'm trying to install on a couple of R51 machines. I've tried all of the suggestions in this thread (Full erase in PC Doctor, BIOS Security settings). I've tried it with 3 different machines, 3 hard drives, and 5 optical drives! None have been successful. All of the hard drives are 40GB Hitachi Travelstars that pass the Drive Fitness Test without an error.

Any help? Is it just a bad set of disks?

piggeek · #30 Post by **piggeek** » Thu Dec 16, 2010 11:27 pm

I had this same problem. I was stuck in the IBM Product Recovery loop. I tried lots of suggestions from these posts. Thank you all so much for sharing your knowledge. It's because of you I have my T42 plowing along like the little workhorse it was meant to be. The most frustrating part was that it had worked once. I had to order the rcovery dics and successfully restored the machine to factory conditions. I wasn't satisfied with 512MB RAM, so I upgraded to 2GB. The machine performed brilliantly. Some time and events later, I was loading 7 dics in my T42 performing subsequent Recovery. That's when I entered the failure loop you are familiar with.

***Spoilers***

I was able to remove the internal hard drive from my T42 and connect it via usb cable I picked up for 9 bucks. I had used it originally to save some data for a friend after Windows wouldn't boot.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EJ ... ss_product

I used HDD Wipe Tool to wipe the drive
http://hddguru.com/software/2006.04.13-HDD-Wipe-Tool/

The other variable I saw was the RAM upgrade.
I replaced the original 512MB back under the keyboard.

I rebooted and loaded 7 dics - why 7 discs when there is a dvd drive?

The IBM Product Recovery successfully restored my system.

I have since replaced my RAM upgrade and the machine is performing beautifully.
I'm not sure if it was completely wiping the drive or returning the original RAM that resolved the issue. I may not have had to replace the original 512 MB RAM, but I was bored and had to do something while I was wiping the drive.

I spent about $70 on the recovery discs and the usb cable.
I spent an extra $70 on the 2GB RAM, but necessary in 2010.

I see that it has created a Recovery partition and I hope that will work without error next time; keep me in your prayers.

IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system

IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system

Re: IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system

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Eureka!

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