Restore from recovery CDs on an X40

[wallyeb]

This post is perhaps useful information to some, and also has questions.

I have an X40, plus a set of factory recovery CDs that I ordered online. I also have a set of factory recovery CDs for my R52.

For the X40, the recovery CD set consists of 6 CD's labeled "Product Recovery CD for Thinkpad X40", disks 1 to 6 of 6. All are FRU p/n 42J5662. Then there is 1 CD labeled "Rescue and Recovery CD", Aug 2005, p/n 41A4007.

When I go through the entire recovery process of rebuilding the entire HD from scratch, it kind of succeeds, but fails in two respects. Firstly, rather than doing an SLP ("System Locked Pre-installation") (which it should do, and which wouldn't require a "phone home" type activation), it does a normal OEM installation, and I'm forced to do a "phone home" activation *twice* during the XP Pro reinstall (I used the telephone method), using the key on the COA attached to the computer. An annoyance, but not a disaster. Secondly, the restore fails to install the diagnostics correctly, in the Rescue and Recovery partition. Actually, the diagnostics are installed okay, but PCDOS 7.1 is not, and the R&R partition normally dual boots PCDOS 7.1 when diagnostics are requested, which it of course can't do without PCDOS installed.

So, I was trying to figure out particularly what what caused the PCDOS 7.1 omission. I have an R52, and the restore CDs for the R52 do install PCDOS 7.1 correctly. Looking at the "Rescue and Recovery" CD, I noted that my R52 uses a Rescue and Recovery CD dated April 2005, p/n 41A3952. Also, in examining the R52 rebuild from the R52 disks, I had looked at partition contents at each reboot in the process (by booting MSDOS 7 (from Win 98SE) from diskette), and noticed that on the R52, PCDOS 7.1 files were installed very early in the process, even before I got to the system specific CDs.

The "Rescue and Recovery" CDs are not system specific, and since the PCDOS 7.1 omission occurred so early in the process, I decided to try using the earlier (April 2005) R&R CD from the R52 set when doing an X40 system restore from CDs.

"Viola." Using the earlier R&R CD from the R52 set fixed *both* of my installation problems. PCDOS 7.1 and the diags were installed properly, AND it did a SLP installation, so that I didn't have to activate with Microsoft.

So, my questions: (1) have others had the same problem with X40 restores from factory restore CDs? (2) does anyone know what is going on here? and, (3) does anyone here care about stuff like this? (I'm new here.)

Just a bit more information. The April 2005 R&R CD installs a version or "Rescue and Repair" that doesn't identify it's version anywhere that I can find, but I once looked in some file and it said version 2.something. The Aug 2005 R&R identifies itself when booting as "Rescue and Recovery 3," and shows pictures of a life preserver when booting. What's interesting is that when I install using the April 2005 R&R CD, it initially installs the older R&R version, but by the time the XP partition is rebuilt, the R&R partition has been updated to the new version "3" (with the life preservers on boot). From there, I decided to reinstall XP yet again, but now using the version "3" of the R&R partition, and when I did this, it did another SLP installation of XP, so I did not have to do a phone home activation.

Comments invited.

Wally Bass

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

I think that you can solve the matter of Windows phoning home by completely wiping the hard drive prior to the install. I use either PC Doctor or the hard drive manufacturer's utility program to erase the disk. I only do about 5% of the drive as it is enough to get rid of any partitioning information. That has helped me to prevent the activation procedure in the past.

I also don't bother to install the recovery partition on a system as old as this simply because whatever the factory set will do, it is already out-of-date. Rather, I do the just the OS install, update the OS to SP3 if needed, download all of the patches/updates and then use Ghost to image a backup. If anything goes wrong with the disk, I've got an OS image that's relatively up-to-date.