Used T60 has no OS but does have XP CoA

[Muse]

I put bootutil.exe on a bootable diskette, booted it, ran A:\>BootUtil -DEFCFG and it worked fine. You'll have to re-enable the feature in BIOS first though.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... ldID=19186

OK, so you think there's no downside to running that? Nothing it would set back to defaults that you wouldn't want set back to defaults?

[Harryc]

No downside, it just fixes the ROM.

[Muse]

I put bootutil.exe on a bootable diskette, booted it, ran A:\>BootUtil -DEFCFG and it worked fine. You'll have to re-enable the feature in BIOS first though.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... ldID=19186

Well, I'm confused.

I guess I don't know how to create the bootable CD. Well, I thought I did. I took the Preboot.exe, ran the EXE on another machine (i.e. in Windows), it expanded into a set of directories/files on the C:\ drive, and the bootutil.exe file itself is here:

C:\Intel15.6\APPS\BootUtil\DOS\bootutil.exe

I made a bootable CD with that file, bootutil.exe in the root directory. If I put that CD in a Windows machine, the only file I see is bootutil.exe, which seems odd to me. I have my Explorer configured to show hidden and system files, but I see no other file on the CD. However, a Windows machine does boot to an A:\> prompt with the CD. However, bootutil.exe is not seen by DOS at the A:\> prompt! What's going on here? What did I do wrong? I read much of the readme file and couldn't get a handle on what I did wrong. You said you created a bootable floppy however my laptops don't have floppy drives.

Another thing: I wasn't able to get into the T60 BIOS of the machine until I removed the HD. It insisted on bringing up the R&R screen, regardless of what I did including holding down the ThinkVantage button. Why is that? I reenabled the boot from network option and the error messages are again happening. Please, please advise! Thanks!

[Harryc]

No, put a diskette in the drive and right click on the A drive in windows explorer. Select 'Create a bootable diskette' and format it as fat32 (probably a default). Once it finishes copy the bootutil.exe file onto it. Reboot and run the command.

[Muse]

Finally! Having success Worked through the corrupted ROM problem, got a bootable CD with bootutil.exe that was visible and fixed that problem.

Still couldn't restore from R&R disks, though. I used a Windows 7 install DVD to inspect the HD and found that there was a system partition of 6xxMB and the rest unallocated space. I removed everything so it was all unallocated and then tried running R&R and lo and behold, I am able to restore and it's doing it right now, voila! Sigh... it was not easy! Will see just what kind of state my T60 was in mid March 2007 pretty soon, I expect!

[Muse]

Nope, it spent over 10 minutes copying stuff from the R&R startup disk, asked me to power off the machine and power it up again with the optical drive empty, but after doing that it's acting like it did before. No matter what disk I put it the drive, it won't proceed.

Maybe I can create new Restore disks from this my first T60 and use them???? Whatcha think?

[Muse]

No, put a diskette in the drive and right click on the A drive in windows explorer. Select 'Create a bootable diskette' and format it as fat32 (probably a default). Once it finishes copy the bootutil.exe file onto it. Reboot and run the command.

Did all but the bolded. The machine doesn't have a floppy drive. What I did was take the diskette and put it in my desktop, ran Nero and created a bootable CD (CD-RW in this case) with the boot files being supplied from the A: drive (the diskette). That created a bootable CD-RW and the bootutil.exe from that did work.

Now I'd like to figure out how to get XP on the machine. The R&R 7CD disk set just isn't working, can't imagine why. Can I make a new set from my old T60 that I can load on the _new_ one that doesn't have an OS now?

[Harryc]

Can I make a new set from my old T60 that I can load on the _new_ one that doesn't have an OS now?

You can only make one set, so if you've already made one the answer is no.

[Norway Pad]

I would almost be tempted to say that unless there is some specific reason you can't or won't to do a clean install from a XP Pro disk, you should maybe consider doing that by now.. I am sure some computer nerd near you has a plain XP Pro (preferably SP2) disk to lend you.

Drivers needs to be installed, and you probably need to call MS to activate, yes, but as soon as you install the driver for the cabled network connection from a USB key, you have Internet access and can just run System Update to take care of the system software, and Windows Update to update Windows. I can even give you a list over the Lenovo system files/drivers/applications I use when I reinstall T60s, if you chose to do it the manual way. Probably not advisable if this is your fist time doing it. And System Update, according to other users, does a good job of installing this for you.

Just my quick advice, your machine.

[Muse]

Yo, my nephew's wife's folks live in Boise! Go Boise State! Magical team.

My first thought (well, early on) was to look for a torrent of a clean un-messed-up XP Pro ISO, and I may do it yet. I could probably get a disc from someone I know if I get the word out in a group email, maybe I will. There must for 1000s in this town. Thanks for the ideas. I'm not afraid of installing drivers and using System Update. I just used it for my other machine, also recently received (Nov. 9), a T61 on which I installed Win7 64bit Ultimate. For that I had the install disk so it was quite easy all in all. Only problem I can think of right now is a persistent problem in that I'm informed still that I should install an Intel 2-driver update and when I do so I'm told that the versions I'm about to replace are newer than the ones I'm trying to install:

Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver for Windows 64bit
Intel(R) Turbo Memory Driver

[Muse]

After today's attempt to install XP from the R&R backup I made in March 2006 I decided to have a look at the 250GB HD, see what shape it was in. The disk was 100% unallocated when I started R&R and it said it was going to format the drive. The first disk seemed to install OK ("startup"), but no others. R&R didn't do a thing when any of them was inserted. So, I wanted to look at the shape of the HD and I put in a Windows 7 install disk and it showed that there was a system partition of 605MB and the rest was unallocated space. This seems fishy. I am wondering if I'd have better luck if I started the backup to a single primary formatted partition.

[Norway Pad]

Yo, my nephew's wife's folks live in Boise! Go Boise State! Magical team.

My first thought (well, early on) was to look for a torrent of a clean un-messed-up XP Pro ISO, and I may do it yet. I could probably get a disc from someone I know if I get the word out in a group email, maybe I will. There must for 1000s in this town. Thanks for the ideas. I'm not afraid of installing drivers and using System Update.

Magical team with a magical colored home stadium field. I am not from here (Not from the US at all, originally) and my wife and my in-laws are from Minneapolis, so we are more into the MN Vikings here. But of course, it's hard to not be enthusiastic about the team from your home town, so it's great fun when they win.

I have been used to always having all kinds of WIn OS discs around, but we are probably more nerds than most people. If you struggle to get a hold of one, I have one here you can just have, and I can send it to you in the mail. Let me know how it turns out.

[Muse]

If you struggle to get a hold of one, I have one here you can just have, and I can send it to you in the mail. Let me know how it turns out.

Thank you. I am going to try some other things first, my head is teaming with ideas. It may well be after Thanksgiving before I get an OS on the system or even know how I'm going to do it. I may ask for you to send that disk. Nice to know I have that option! It is a beautiful machine. Looks from the shine on the keys like it's been typed on a great deal, but it seems to be in very excellent condition, and the screen seems pristine, a nice WXGA+ 14.1 inch, like the one on this machine. I think it probably has ATI x1300 graphics (my internet search on the motherboard FRU indicated that), but it doesn't seem possible to tell from what I see in the BIOS, and I've seen nothing on the screen other than the BIOS GUI, and the Rescue and Recovery GUI and the blue sky screen that immediately precedes it for a few seconds.

[Muse]

This sounds like you originally made a backup to CD's using rescue and recovery and not a recovery CD set. There is a difference ... if it was a recovery CD set, one of the options on the first screen would be to restore the HD to factory contents. I doubt it's the hard drive, but who knows. As George said, blank out the drive first. Use a utility like activekilldisk.
http://www.killdisk.com/

I believe that option was offered me, so maybe it is a recovery CD set. Like I said, when I first got the machine I was hesitant to do anything with it because I didn't want to get it into a non-default condition. It took me a while before I got my toes wet and got in the water. This was early 2007.

Well, I figure I'll give it at least one more try and probably try the activekilldisk utility (I haven't looked at it yet, but I surmise that it will allow me to undo parititioning, etc. and return the drive to like new status from a boot CD). I was able to return the drive to all unallocated space using Windows 7 32 bit disk, so maybe I'll just do that and see if R&R will let me restore to factory condition, assuming you are correct that that option being offered me suggests that the set is capable of it.

[Norway Pad]

I may ask for you to send that disk. Nice to know I have that option!

Let me know if you have the slightest suspicion you might need it, it will take a couple of days to get there. It's on a cd-r, so not a big loss for us even if it turns out you don't need it.

[Muse]

Let me know if you have the slightest suspicion you might need it, it will take a couple of days to get there. It's on a cd-r, so not a big loss for us even if it turns out you don't need it.

OK, sounds great. Indeed, I might need it. My experiments today with R&R were not successful. I'll PM you my address.

Magical team with a magical colored home stadium field. I am not from here (Not from the US at all, originally) and my wife and my in-laws are from Minneapolis, so we are more into the MN Vikings here. But of course, it's hard to not be enthusiastic about the team from your home town, so it's great fun when they win.

The only team around here that's delivered for quite a few years is this year's S.F. Giants. I went to the ticker tape parade a couple weeks ago. Great stuff. Stanford's doing great this year but it's hard for me to get excited about them because I'm a Cal grad (their bitter rival). However, I really am happy for them. I never got into the bitterness stuff.