R&R Partition is Visible with Drive Letter

[DPierce42]

I hate to be the guy who joins a forum just to ask for help with his minor crisis, but I found thinkpads.com while researching my problem, and it seems like a great resource.

I'm the proud new owner of a T61. This is my first Thinkpad. I've been a Compaq guy since the dark ages, carefully trained by Houston to hate IBM & Thinkpads. But my old Compaq finally bit the dust, and decided to try something new. Anyway, I'm *really* impressed with this Thinkpad, and glad I made the switch.

So, after about six weeks of usage, I booted up one morning, and XP decided to run chkdsk during start-up for some reason. I had properly shut down the night before. It was checking drive 'E:', which turned out to be the R&R service partition.

I could *swear* this partition was not visible in the past, and I've never had a drive E:. This partition is normally hidden right? Or is my memory just that bad?

Once XP fully loaded, the SERVICEV001 drive on E: was visible and has been visible ever since. The laptop boots just fine into either XP or into the R&R partition when you press the blue button. There's nothing *wrong* with the hard disk, it's just odd that I can see the E: drive when all the literature on the Internet says that XP cannot see the "EISA Configuration" partition outside of Disk manager, and will not map a drive letter to it. Well it did. In the process of troubleshooting and generally flailing around, I've tried the following ...

1) I've run 3 different anti-virus scans, checking the boot records, and ran a rootkit check.

2) I've rebuilt the MBR and re-wrote the master boot loader using BMGR32.

3) I've tried using DISKPART and XP Disk Manager to simply un-assign the letter from the drive, but neither program shows that a drive letter is actually mapped to the volume (yet it is -- right there -- it shows up as E: in Explorer). Actually when you right-click the partition in Disk Manager, it gives you NO options, which is the documented correct behavior for Disk Manager when dealing with "EISA Configuration" partitions.

4) I've randomly run a few tools that checks the health of the drive, both hardware and partition structure, and tools that check the health of the registry (I'm grasping, but why not?).

Ordinarily, I would write this off. Who cares if the service partition is visible, right? Heck, most of the help I've found on the Internet deals with people who are *trying* to make their service partition visible and can't because XP won't touch it. I have the opposite problem.

But now I'm super curious as to what happened, and this will bug me.

Other symptoms that happened the day the service partition became visible ...

1) Acronis True Image would no longer load and do backups. It said I had no hard disks! Following their tech support instructions, you're supposed to re-install when you get this error. So, I re-installed Acronis, and now it works fine.

2) Some (but not all) of the tools I use to burn CDs/DVDs claim I have no devices capable of burning CDs & DVDs. This may be a red herring as I'm not sure these tools ever worked on this laptop.

3) Lenovo Active Protection (the g-shock sensor for the hard disk) will no longer load. No icon in the tray. If I run the config app from the Control Panel, all the options are grayed out. (Although the 'Enable Active Protection System' box is checked, albeit a gray checkbox that I can't modify.) The 'Real-time Status' screen on the second tab says 'No shock detected; Hard drive running', although if you pick the laptop up and tilt it, the animation doesn't change like it used to, so clearly the UI isn't communicating with the driver. (All the right software is loaded, though -- the TPHDEXLG.exe service is running and TPShocks.exe is being loaded on startup out of the registry.)

So that's my story. If anyone can provide any help, I'd be most appreciative. I have a feeling something deep in the registry is mis-wired, but I posted the problem here in hopes somebody else had a similar problem with their Thinkpad, especially the Active Protection System symtom.

The only lead I have is a rumor that once Windows 'touches' a volume by running chkdsk on it, and writes a windows serial number to it, Windows will continue to see and use that volume even if it's not supposed to. (But why did it run chkdsk on it in the first place?)

Thanks again for any comments!

[GomJabbar]

The T61 is a different animal than the previous T-series ThinkPads. Moderator ryengineer reports that there is no Predesktop Area Security setting in a T61 BIOS for Secure, Normal, and Disable as in previous ThinkPads (you might verify this for yourself). When the Predesktop Security is set to Normal or Secure, it is hidden from normal Windows operations, but it can still be seen in Disk Management. There is a filter driver in Windows that hides this partition.

I suspect that the new service partition also is hidden by this filter driver. If you see that partition in My Computer, then this filter driver is probably not starting. The way I would go about to try and fix this; is to first do a full scan on your hard drive to fix any errors on it. Next I would uninstall Rescue and Recovery, reboot, then reinstall Rescue and Recovery. The installation program should be located on your hard drive. Search the .xml files for Rescue and Recovery to find it. I think it might be in a folder called Lenovo, or in one of it's subfolders. I am not sure as I do not have access to these newer ThinkPads. On my T42 the Rescue and Recovery installation program is located at: C:\IBMTOOLS\APPS\IBMRNR.EXE.

[BradS]

To add to GomJabbar's post:

On my T61, I found the Rescue and Recovery drivers @ C:\SWTOOLS\apps\rnr

[DPierce42]

Thanks both for the replies. GomJabbar, your mention of filter drivers got my interest. I went and did some self-education on upper, lower, and bus filter drivers, and got a pretty neat free tool from www.bustrace.com that shows which of these drivers are loaded, and what they are bound to. Just about the only filter driver I had loaded was Acronis'. (Which I had recently re-installed.)

Since I was having trouble with the Active Protection utility, I decided to reinstall it (thanks, BradS, all that stuff was right where you described) and reinstalling it fixed it. AND I noticed APS had installed a filter driver (ShockPrf.sys) that wasn't there before!

Reading some more, I discovered that Roxio CD Creator and the Sonic CD burner tools that come with the T61 both require filter drivers, too, but none of them are presently loaded.

Essentially, somehow, my filter drivers got wiped out. I'm not sure what caused this; but at least I have an answer and I know what I need to do to put things back.

I'll post again if any additional helpful information becomes of this little adventure. Thanks again both!

[thedogwarrior]

Interesting to learn that the T61 series doesn' t have the predesktop security setting in BIOS. I've been butting my head against that brick wall for a week or so now.

I've got a T61p, came with Vista Ult. I've got a retail copy of Vista Ult 64, and want to upgrade to it. I've got a 100GB 7200rpm hard drive I can install to this system.

Would there be any problem with simply swapping out the factory HD and installing the new HD, and installing the Ult. 64-bit on it?