Restoring my ThinkPad R61

[-Adam]

Hello,

About a month ago I restored my laptop completely. I got the BSOD (Blue screen of death). I sent it back, however they said they could not fix it due to it being my fault.

I ordered a restore CD from User-Guides.co.uk and received it today.
I do not know how to run it, As I cannot get onto my laptop at all. It loads, Then I get the option of safe mode, with networking, with command prompt and start windows normally. All of them do the same thing, Go directly to the blue screen of death.

Anyway, I put my CD into my Laptop and turned my laptop on, and it did the same.
Somebody told me I could run the cd frpm the bios menu from startup/boot.

Iv got to the boot bit and he told me I needed to rearrange the way things started.
Could somebody help me?

Type: 8930-A41

What I currently have in order in boot priority order:

1. ATA HDD1:
2. ATA HDD2:
3. ATAPI CD1:
4. ATAPI CD0:MATSHITADVD-RAM UJ-680- (PM)
5. ATA HDD0: WDC WD800BEVS-08RST3- (S1)
6. USB FDD:
7. USB CD:
8. PCI LAN: MBA V10.0.9 Slot 0400
Excluded from boot order:
-USB HDD

Also, If somebody needs to know, BIOS version 2.20.

Could somebody help me please?

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

I'd say that the first thing you should do is attempt to test out the hardware in your system. Blue screens can occur from a variety of sources; some actual physical damage (like to the disk drive or bad memory) or it can be software related (bad files on disk or Windows registry problems). If you have a way of burning an .ISO image onto a CD, then you can download a copy of PC Doctor for DOS for the R61 from here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-56222

This diagnostic is able to check most of the important items in your system. While it does have a memory test, I prefer using a dedicated program like this:

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso (which seems to be down at the moment )

Both programs reside on bootable CDs so you will either have to change your BIOS' boot order, or press the F12 key to get the boot menu and select the ATAPI CD0 drive. Once booted, either diagnostic program will essentially load a version of DOS and perform all of the testing from there. PC Doctor is able to test out most of your motherboard (CPU/Coprocessor tests) and hard drive (Fixed Disk tests). memtest86+ will automatically start testing your system memory and will report any failures in red.

If the laptop's hardware checks out favorably, then you may be dealing with a software issue on the hard drive. Certainly wiping the disk and reloading everything will probably fix things, but you will lose all of the data that's currently on the drive.

edit: I just looked at user-guides.co.uk and it appears that they only offer an IBM driver recovery disk, not one which contains a Windows OS. If that's the case, then it may not be able to help you if there is some damage to the Windows software structure. For that, you may need a Lenovo "recovery" disk set. Those are able to restore everything which originally came on the laptop (Windows and any included applications - i.e., what some people call "bloatware"). It's also possible that there's still a hidden partition on your drive which will perform the same action.