HPA gone, new hard drive, can I get it back?

[Mrgeevo]

So my beloved t40's drive finally bit the bullet. So I figured I'd step up and do some upgrades. 2 gb of ram, and two 160 gb drives. I've loaded my spare with windows 7, and it runs pretty good for my t40's specs. However my main drive I'd like to use my original t40's xp and backup partition. But from the research I've done, I think I'm screwed. My old drive is toast, from the hpa to the normal partition, toast. I have 4 recovery CDs that I bought online, however when I boot to them it fails. It says recovery drive=x, ram drive =c. And thats it. I can't obviously clone my old drive because it's a goner, and I'd really like the hpa back in case I need to do a restore on the fly. Please please, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[poshgeordie]

Hi and welcome to the forums.

I'm no expert in using recovery discs but a couple of questions:

Are you booting from the CD by pressing F12 and selecting Boot from CD?

Are the recovery discs original IBM manufacturered or copied, or produced from another T40 recovery partition as far as you can tell?

[Mrgeevo]

Thanks for the response, my cd drive has the highest boot priority, so it just boots straight to the disc. The discs I just bought from somebody on ioffer, they are four discs which he said are an exact copy of his IBM recovery discs. There are 4 cdrs. Please don't tell me I need to spend 100 bucks from IBM lol

[poshgeordie]

Maybe the problem is because the seller has made a copy of the original ones and not done it correctly. For instance when burning Linux .iso CD's they have to be burnt at very low speeds or else there are errors.

You could also try running the first CD (the bootable one) on another PC / laptop to see if the CD is read properly. OK, don't go too far and damage your existing OS. I'd say that if it doesn't boot then to return the CD's to the vendor.

I'd maybe wait for someone else to come along to either confirm or (more likely!) have some better suggestions, before doing any of the above.

[GomJabbar]

Do some searches on fwbackup and fwrestore. I believe this is what you need. You might look on thinkwiki's site for some information as well.