IBM Product Recovery failed (yet another recovery problem)

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kimo · #1 Post by **kimo** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 9:15 am

So last night I tried restoring my T42p to it's factory settings by using product recovery cds I received here on the forums. After all 7 cds were copied over, I was asked to restart. After the reboot, it continued with the factory restore and began to process a bunch of .imz files, which is where I got an error message "IBM Product Recovery failed to restore your system"

Does anyone have any advice on how to get around this or what could be possible causes?

#2 Post by **richk** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 11:06 am

Run drive fitness test to see if the HDD is good. Assuming it is good, if it is an Hitachi drive, you can then use their erase utility to clear the drive. Otherwise, you will need a different errase program. Do you want the restore partition on the disk? What you do next depends on your answer.

kimo · #3 Post by **kimo** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 4:00 pm

the drive is definately good. does the drive need to be formatted? i thought the recovery discs would do all that for me.

#4 Post by **richk** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 4:26 pm

In order to answer, I need you to answer the question in my first response. Do you want to end up with a recovery partition? Did you used to have one?

#5 Post by **Kyocera** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:01 pm

If you have the correct recovery cd's it should work correctly. The cd's will set the hd back to factory, hpa and all. I'd give it another go, I would also watch the install process, I know that sounds exteremly boring but you can see if there is some kind of weird occurance during this process that might point you towards a problem. I used to enjoy watching the process

, kick back have beer and just enjoy

kimo · #6 Post by **kimo** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:31 pm

richk wrote:In order to answer, I need you to answer the question in my first response. Do you want to end up with a recovery partition? Did you used to have one?

To be honest, it doesn't really matter to me whether there is a restore partition or not, whichever way is easiest. As of right now, all partitions are deleted.

LOL @ Kyocera. By the way, all three attempts I made went smoothly until I reached the point mentioned above.

#7 Post by **GomJabbar** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 6:25 pm

When you use the Product Recovery Disc set, make sure that the security for the Predesktop Area in the BIOS is set to Normal.

Depending upon the history of your hard drive, you may need to zero-out (also sometimes called low-level format) your hard drive. This is what richk was referring to above. Fdisk and Windows format will not do this. Try one of the following utilities, but set the security for the Predesktop Area to Disabled while you low-level format the hard drive. After formatting set the security for the Predesktop Area back to Normal.

I did see someone post that PC Doctor for DOS has this feature, but I have not verified this for myself.

Note that each utility below only works on it's own brand of hard drive.

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

Fujitsu Erase Utility

Samsung HUTIL

kimo · #8 Post by **kimo** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:45 pm

i see. thanks to gomjabbar and richk for the advice. i will look into the low level formatting and hopefully it'll set everything straight.

kimo · #9 Post by **kimo** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:25 pm

since i have a hitachi drive, i used the drive fitness program to erase both the boot sector and the hard disk. before doing this procedure, i diabled the ibm predesktop and renabled it before using the recovery disks. unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem. i am still getting the same error at the same time.

is it possible that the recovery cds are either faulty or not the correct version? if it were faulty, i would assume that it would have failed during the copying stages...

#10 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:44 pm

You may have defective or the wrong discs. Sometimes happens. I know of no other reason for your failure.

IBM Product Recovery failed (yet another recovery problem)

IBM Product Recovery failed (yet another recovery problem)

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