can't boot WinXP or R&R

[profilek]

hello,

a couple of months ago I bought Lenovo Thinkpad X60s. It is a great machine but recently I started to have some problems with Windows (I just guess that it's some worms/viruses/trojans). I decided to do recovery discs (1CD + 1DVD). It worked smoothly.

I have an external DVD drive LITE-ON DVDRW SHM-165P6S connected through USB. I put the first cd in the dirve. BIOS recognized the cd and started the boot. After a second I saw the message (it is very fast so I dont know the full message) "Setup is recognizing your configuration.." and after that I have a black screen. The drive stops to read the cd.

I checked with another windows XP install cd (original from work, freshly unwrapped) and it was the same reaction - black screen.

I thought it is a memory so I exchanged but nothing happend, still black screen just after the boot. I checked AHCI and Compatibility mode. I checked couple different cd kinds (from verbatim, sony to some noname). I checked the a different DVD drive. different USB cable.

All the time the same reaction after the boot - black screen.

Now I have also the problems with ethernet. I can't connect through it by creating WAN port (PPPoE). I always get "Not known or internal error". everything fully updated.

But this is not the most strange thing

Everything works like a charm under Linux - starting from booting (Knoppix, kubuntu, ubuntu, slax and many others) and finishing on the ethernet and PPPoE.

Can somebody help me? I wrote to ibm/lenovo a request but now it's more than a week and they still haven't contacted with me (except the server response).

I know that I could work under linux but I need to create some application also under windows and I'm forced to recover Windows.

does anybody has a clue what's going on with my machine?

regards,
Kamil


ps. with the faulty machine i bought another one exactly the same and the boot process works with the same drive without problems.

[Zeitgeist]

You could try to delete all partitions with fidisk (do not format or create partitions afterwards) before running the recovery CD/DVD.

[egibbs]

I have sometimes had to do a full erase HDD using PC Doctor to get recovery CDs to work.

Ed Gibbs