R50p recovery fails: disk full!

[thorine]

The things which led to the need for a recovery are really a long story. I will elaborate if it is necessary. However, important notes

(1) I have been able to install a copy of xp (from a cd/license I had available) just fine. (I decided I want all the extra little bits that came with my thinkpad, though, so I went to use the recovery.)

(2) I can boot into the product recovery fine.

(3) The recovery begins ok, but quite soon, as it pkunzips the various packages, you begin to see a pkunzip warning (W10) can't create "(the file or directory)" over and over. At the end of each package, I can see it (very very quickly) flash something like "(...stuff...) disk full! (...stuff...)" before the screen clears and goes to the next package. It turns out this it the pkunzip E50 (disk full) error.

(4) The recovery is extracting from "C:\recovery" and inflating to "C:\ibmtools" (etc.).

(5) When I finally stop the process (or it ends itself), I can still boot into the windows xp install (it is unblemished!). In fact, no trace of an "ibmtools" directory exists.

With all of this in mind, it seems as though the recovery program is trying to install itself in its own little partition. (?)

I could not find any relevant results when googling for "thinkpad recovery disk full". Similarly, I couldn't find anything here when searching for "recovery disk full". Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ryengineer]

With all of this in mind, it seems as though the recovery program is trying to install itself in its own little partition. (?)

That's exactly what it does, initially.

I think the partition wants to expand itself and isn't finding adequate space on your HDD or allocated space for the service partition isn't good enough for it. Your best bet is to resize it via some 3rd party tool which could be kind of little complicated.

I hope you do had created a set of Product Recovery disks and backed up your important data before installing the new OS.

[thorine]

Well, it is a rather long story. The short answer is that I didn't have a recent off-disk backup of the data. Turns out that part shouldn't hurt too bad. It is taking a long time to re-install all of my tools.

I can resize it with systemrescuecd. Should that suffice? I mean to say, I should be able to resize it without losing the info on the rescue partition? (I have resized partitions before like that, but just not a rescue partition.)

How big should it be?