Clean Install with Blue button Recovery enabled

[ken.liddle@aah.co.uk]

Hi all

Im a newbie to the IBM laptop and have been granted the task of creating an XPSP2 build (with drivers, hotfixes and our apps) on to a T60.

The problem I have is that my Mgt wants the blue button recovery feature enabled so users can restore to day one with some help from the helpdesk.

I have tried to do this with the original IBM service partition installed, fresh copy of XPSP2 and then managed to shaft the MBR or something I did wrong probably did this and then formatting the mbr lost the service partition (i have tried the rrcrr.exe but this only works on Lenovo builds).

I ideally want a fresh/clean install of XPSP2 as described above on 2 partitions C: = System OS<16GB>, D:= (moved) Documents and Settings <25GB> (setup due to scripts running after restore).

A third partition I imagine will exist for the IBM service partition so I can load the IBM shell to perform the recovery tasks.

Has anyone done this before and if so how?

Would appreciate any help on this as I have only delat with hp, toshiba and dell laptops before and never tried an IBM.

I'm not technically inept but it might show.

[GomJabbar]

I do believe the Rescue and Recovery - Recovery repair diskette can fix the MBR so that you can boot both XP and the service partition after a clean XP install. I recommend when you install XP, don't partition the drive, just format the C: partition. After installing XP, boot the floppy and choose replace the MBR (repair didn't work for me), and when the screen comes up, choose Option 1 for newer versions of Rescue and Recovery. I used this diskette after an install of Vista damaged the MBR to access the service partition on my XP hard drive (with the factory preload, updates and added software).

The above should give you a clean XP install with the IBM factory preload in the service partition. If you choose to restore factory contents, you will end up with the original IBM factory software on it.

I believe there is a method to put a custom XP image (if thats the right word) in the service partition, but this is beyond my current knowledge. See ThinkVantage Technologies Deployment Guide.

BTW, welcome to forum.thinkpads.com!

EDITED

[claudeo]

A couple of notes that may or may not be helpful...

There are some documents on the IBM web site about customization of the service partition to a different image for corporate deployment. AFAIR this does require acquiring from IBM/Lenovo some special software tool to configure the image. Right now the document links seem to be broken

Got my new T60 yesterday. Found out that it has 2 partitions. One FAT32 and one that (unless you hit the blue button immediately on first boot) gets formatted to NTFS. It seems that the machine is set up to boot first in the FAT32 partition (which is the "hidden" service partition) and from that into the NTFS partition (which you will see as Drive C). Windows is totally oblivious to that, sees only Drive C. Reformatting the disk erases the MBR and the service partition -- obviously not what you want, unless you are using something like the deployment tool I mention above.
I do wonder whether, if I had hit the blue button fast enough on first boot, I would have had the option to make the C partition smaller. I do prefer to split into C and D drives. But now it looks like I'm stuck with a large C partition until I get a partition resizing utility.