Help: T30 F11 no longer invoke Product Recovery Program

[haivu]

Hello folks,
I screwed up and need your help badly. I have a used T30, which I installed the latest Ubuntu 6.06 (a Linux distro) to dual boot with my Windows XP Pro.

When I no longer needed Ubuntu, I tried to invoke F11 for IBM Thinkpad Product Recovery Program, but the F11 no longer worked. Desperate, I ran FIXMBR, which did allow me to boot directly to Windows XP Pro, but still the F11 key no longer works. What can I do to restore my laptop to the factory configuration?

Your help is greatly appreciated.
Hai

[_erazor_]

you need the product recovery cd set.

if your machine is still under warranty (which it is likely not) then you can get them for free from the lenovo hotline.

otherwise, you need to buy them on ebay for some bucks or directly from lenovo which is about $50 or so if you are out of warranty.

[Kyocera]

Click on the HD Clone link in my sig, and go toward the bottom of the document and read about the fix mbr floppy, it worked for me and is fairly quick and painless. This is provided when you installed ubuntu you didn't wipe out the restore partition, if you look in disk management in your XP partition you should be able to see a 2.47 (approx) gig fat32 partition if it is there the floppy should fix the problem. If not you'll need some CD's.

[haivu]

Thank you Kyocera and _erazor_ for helping me. I finally fixed the problem and I would like to tell my tale for those who run into the same problem.

First, I followed Kyocera's advice and downloaded rnr31_rrd.exe from
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-54483
Then I made a floppy disk with it. Since my laptop does not have a floppy drive, I created a bootable CD based on the floppy disk.

However, the programs in the CD do not like the read-only media so I asked my good neighbor for help and he modified the bootable CD to include the creation of a RAM disk. After booting, we copied the contents of the CD to the RAM disk, fix up the batch files to remove references to the A: drive, then run "DOE.EXE" off the RAM disk. After that, just follow the steps to fix the MBR.