HPA recreation fails with X30 hard drive upgrade

[gbdrbob]

Hello,

I'm trying to upgrade my X30 with a new 160GB Hitachi 5K160 hard drive. I'm having big problems getting the restore disks to recreate the HPA restore area. Has anyone successfully done this?

The details:

If I run the restore disk with the new HD completely blank (no partition table) then after bootup it offers me the opportunity to re-create the HPA. It copies over the contents of the two cds and reboots. Then it fails, I'm left at a dos prompt.

Investigating further reveals two partitions:

IBM-SERVICE which contans a basic dos installation (C: drive)

IBM-TEMP which contains the contents of the restore CDs (D: drive)

The first problem was quite easy to solve. The autoexec.bat script of the boot drive (C:) tries to run the recovery software off c: drive. Changing DRV=C: to DRV=D: in this script launched the recovery software. However when I then selected the option to restore my system it failed again - I was presented a screen with a progress bar which stopped at 54% when the system rebooted. Upon reboot the IBM-TEMP partiton appeared to have been wiped and I had to start all over again.

The second time round I partitioned the drive first with a primary partition covering the whole hard drive. The recovery disks didn't offer the option to restore the HPA and the system restore ran successfully off the CDs.

I'd like to install the HPA since the x30 has no cd drive - I've borrowed a usb dvd drive to get myself up and running.

My restore disks are FRU part no 01R6196, dated 15 August 2002.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[losmeme]

Once the X31 reboots after loading the HPA, you have to select the "Access IBM" button and go into the rescue & recovery area, and THEN select RESTORE TO FACTORY CONTENTS.

The disks only replace the HPA, you then have to use rescue & recovery to install the OS onto the remaining partition.

[gbdrbob]

Once the X31 reboots after loading the HPA, you have to select the "Access IBM" button and go into the rescue & recovery area, and THEN select RESTORE TO FACTORY CONTENTS.

I'm doing that. (except on the x31 it's press F11 rather than the Access ibm button). After the HPA has loaded, it reboots and then the restore process fails as described above.

I thought it may be an issue with the size of the drive so I wiped it, restricted it to 128GB with the hitachi featuretool and tried again. Same result.

When I successfully restored directly off the CD a 30GB partition was created and the rest of the disk was ignored.