X300 Recovery on external USB DVD or HD

[jflamm]

I have a Windows XP X300 with a recovery partition. I successfully made a recovery DVD and also tried the option to allow recovery using an external hard drive. When booting the X300, I hit F12 and select the option to boot from either the DVD or the HD both of which work but both bluescreen into the loading process.

Anyone else try this? Is this the right way to boot from external drives?

[akao]

I'm not sure if this it, but try setting your BIOS from ACHI mode to compatibility mode for the SATA controller.

[jflamm]

I'm not sure if this it, but try setting your BIOS from ACHI mode to compatibility mode for the SATA controller.

Thank you - this did solve the blue screen problem which is strange since I don't understand why the recovery partition wouldn't have the same issue unless it is actually running different software.

I successfully booted to recovery on my external USB drive but didn't see an option to return the machine to factory state.

What I am aiming to do is remove the 4G recovery partition on my X300 (I know how to do this with partition software), but before I do that - I would like to have a solution for getting the machine back to factory state in case I need to do that in the future. Any suggestions?