F11 recovery prompt gone after Win XP Install on T23 w/win2K

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Jeff · #1 Post by **Jeff** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:00 pm

I bought a full install only version of Win XP and installed it on top of the existing Win 2000 partition on my T23. Everything is fine except the F11 recovery prompt and functionality is no longer available during boot up. I didn't delete the recovery partition. In the BIOS set up screen it shows F11 is enabled but I cannot select that entry at all to toggle it on or off. I left the main partition as FAT32. Is there any way to reenable the F11 key during boot up and still have Win XP loaded? I realize that F11 will recover to a Win 2K system, but that is OK. Any suggestions?
Thank you.

#2 Post by **ryengineer** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 11:06 pm

Rescue and Recovery - Recovery repair diskette.

You'll need a floppy disk drive.

Jeff · #3 Post by **Jeff** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 11:55 pm

It worked! Who would have known.
Thanks much!
Glad my wife had one remaining floppy disk in her desk. I discarded all of mine.

caschaf · #4 Post by **caschaf** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:15 pm

I also ran into the same problem, however the recovery repair solution requires a floppy drive which I do not have. I used another computer to create the recovery diskette, then made a bootable CD from it. That returned "write protect error writing drive A" when I booted from the CD. DOE.exe appears to be the program started at boot-up.

Any suggestions for a work around?
Thanks.

#5 Post by **RealBlackStuff** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:37 pm

Depending on your model ThinkPad, you may be able to boot from a USB-stick.
Otherwise go buy a floppy drive on eBay or borrow one from a friend.

caschaf · #6 Post by **caschaf** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:48 pm

I have an x40 2386-5fu. Will that support a bootable USB?

I'm working on the friend with a floppy, but everyone's on vacation...

#7 Post by **RealBlackStuff** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:07 pm

On the left side is a special powered USB port (near the VGA connector) to which you can connect an optical drive. Try it with a bootable USB-stick with that floppy-image.

caschaf · #8 Post by **caschaf** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 9:05 pm

Thanks for your help. Partial success. It took a little bit to figure out and had to download a utility from HP, but I made a bootable USB-stick then copied the files from the floppy. The laptop booted from the USB and I ran the DOE program. First attempt was the default repair and the program stated it was successful. After restart, I used F11 to launch RNR, but got "NTLDR is compressed" error message. I rebooted and tried the replace versus repair option, also successful, but upon reboot and launching RNR got the same NTLDR is compressed error.

Suggestions?

Thanks!

#9 Post by **RealBlackStuff** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:07 pm

Google is your best friend:
http://www.madboot.com/index.php?option ... ;topicseen

caschaf · #10 Post by **caschaf** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 5:04 pm

Correction on Recovery Repair process - originally I thought it worked - it didn't!

I re-ran DOE.exe from the recovery repair disk (USB) and selected repair mbr. I hit pause to catch the text:
"LBA reported Head, Sector, Track **WARNING** values don't match the reported total number of sectors. Error in Hardware or BIOS". I ran DOE again and selected replace mbr, but resulted in same error message.

I then ran BMGR.exe from the RRPC directory on the repair disk and got:
Type is 0e, startCyl=0, LBA=63, size 128449, boot=80
Type is 00
Type is 00
Type is 00
INT 13 shows 8 cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 sectors/track
EXT INT 13 shows 7 cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 sectors/track, total=128512
Effective INT 13 is 7 cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 sectors/track
WARNING, there is no service partition.
Nothing to do

I removed the USB stick, rebooted to WinXP and opened Disk Management. WinXP reports two logical drives:
IBM_PRELOAD (C), NTFS, Healthy (system), 33.16GB
SERVICEV001, FAT32, Healthy (EISA configuration), 4.09GB

Any suggestions on how to correct or get around the error in the DOE program?

Thanks!

#11 Post by **RealBlackStuff** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 6:01 pm

There was an earlier post about the same subject, maybe that helps?
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?p=284101

K0LO · #12 Post by **K0LO** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:33 pm

caschaf:

The values reported for your disk geometry are wrong. For the IBM BIOS it should report as 240 heads vs. 255 heads. In fact, the values reported by BMGR.exe sound all wrong; I suspect it is reporting the values for the flash drive instead of the hard drive.

I recently tried helping someone run this utility from a USB flash drive like you are trying. We were spectacularly unsuccessful. Probably the DOE.exe utility is hard-coded to run from a floppy and examine the BIOS device (80h), which will normally be the hard disk. Since you booted from a USB flash drive, it gets assigned device 80h by the BIOS at boot time and the hard disk gets assigned device 81h. So the utility is probably trying to modify the MBR of the flash drive instead of the hard disk. Another reason to suspect that this is happening is in the BMGR.exe output on the first line (boot=80). That number is either referring to the boot flag on partition one being 80h or else it is referring to the BIOS drive (the boot drive) being device 80h.

Bottom line is that you will probably have to borrow a USB floppy drive to get the utility to work properly. We should all bug Lenovo to get them to release this utility in a form that will work on something other than floppies. Who has a floppy drive with a laptop any more?

P.S. The person that I was helping was trying to gain access to the recovery partition with the intent of doing a restore to factory state. We eventually did that by making a bootable grub4dos disk and booting manually into the recovery partition.

caschaf · #13 Post by **caschaf** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 10:17 pm

Mark,
That makes sense. I have to admit all this is a bit over my pay grade! Having said that, I reviewed the link provided by the previous poster and used part of their suggestions. I copied the repair recovery files to another USB drive (non-bootable) and plugged that into one of the USB ports. I then took the boot CD that I created earlier and control C out of the autoexec to get a command prompt. Here's the interesting thing, when I tried to find the USB drive (which was lettered D:\) I found the Service partition on C:\ with directories: Recovery, IBMWork, MFG, DOS, TPTools, MININT, Preboot, SWWork and all the files).

You mentioned booting manually into the recovery partition. Can you describe the procedure to recover by accessing the service partition by the command prompt?

Thanks,
Chuck

K0LO · #14 Post by **K0LO** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 11:31 pm

Chuck:

I think you have to boot into the recovery partition to start a recovery operation. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I'm wrong.

One way to boot is to use a grub4dos CD or USB flash drive. A good place to start is this article. Once you get grub working either on your bootable DOS flash drive or on a standalone flash drive you would do the following:

1. Let grub boot into its menu
2. Go to a command prompt
3. Boot to the recovery partition by typing the following:

Code: Select all

root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
boot

The above will boot the first partition on the internal hard disk, assuming that you have booted the PC from a USB flash drive, which will be referenced as "hard disk 0" (hd0). Then your laptop's hard disk will become "hard disk 1" (hd1). Partitions are numbered starting at 0, thus (hd1,0). You may have to hunt around to find the correct disk and partition to boot.

Once the recovery partition boots you can use it to restore to factory state. In the process the restore will re-write the MBR code and the F11 button will start working again. In your case a factory restore will probably over-write your new installation of WinXP, so be careful.

#15 Post by **Kyocera** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:39 am

one thing I have done in the past is use the first CD in a recovery set, this will sometimes allow you to boot into the recovery partition and recover the machine to the OS installed on that partition. I did this by accident once and on purpose the second time just to make sure it had done a full working recovery.

The down side is you'll have to use the first CD and not the f11 key so Im not sure this is what you are looking for.

#16 Post by **RealBlackStuff** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 7:40 am

Come to think of it, if you can boot into Windows, why not try to UNcompress the NTLDR and any other files that are compressed first?
They are the initial source of your problem.
Here is a utility to find all those: http://exodusdev.com/products/find-comp ... ntfs-files

Once they have come off their diet, things might look brighter!

thinkpac · #17 Post by **thinkpac** » Thu Aug 06, 2009 1:30 pm

Kyocera wrote:one thing I have done in the past is use the first CD in a recovery set, this will sometimes allow you to boot into the recovery partition and recover the machine to the OS installed on that partition. I did this by accident once and on purpose the second time just to make sure it had done a full working recovery.

The down side is you'll have to use the first CD and not the f11 key so Im not sure this is what you are looking for.

Thank you for this tip. I recently did a factory install, but afterwards, I haven't seen any prompt talking about F11. I now have my T60 in a bit of a screwed up state so I think I'll just reload the factory install from the hidden partition. But I wasn't sure how to do that if I can't hit F11 (and I don't have any laptop floppy drives). I'll try the "first CD" method.

F11 recovery prompt gone after Win XP Install on T23 w/win2K

F11 recovery prompt gone after Win XP Install on T23 w/win2K

Boot sector repair program worked

F11 recovery prompt gone after Win XP Install

Recovery Repair MBR did not work

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