Rescue and Recovery

[Muse]

I bought a refurb T61 around a year ago which arrived beautifully packaged and appeared for all the world to be factory refurbished. The 100GB HD evidently had the factory install of Vista Business, the OS authenticated by the sticker on the bottom. I used the OS very sparingly for a few weeks, doing only a few things, never making R&R media. I had a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and a spare 640GB HD, so I removed the HD with Vista Business on it and replaced it with the new 640GB HD and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and have been using it since. I now have need of a 2.5" HD for one of my T60's whose HD died a few weeks ago. I figure I can use the 100GB HD. However, I'd like to have the option to run Vista Business on the T61 in the event that I want to run the Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on another machine at some point. Therefore I figure the thing to do is to put the 100GB HD back in the T61 and create rescue media, from which I can presumably recreate the factory install of Vista Business on a fresh 2.5" HD inserted in the T61 at some point in the future if I so desire.

I initiated this plan today, putting the 100GB HD back in the T61 and choosing Rescue and Recovery from the start menu. There was a message saying that media had already been created and only one set could be created and if I needed a new set I should contact Lenovo, however that seemed to be greyed out and I couldn't tell if it was for real or not. I clicked OK or something like that and I was asked to insert media and I put in a DVD-R and after around 10-15 minutes of writing and verifying it told me to label it "Rescue and Recovery Startup Disc." I figured that after I removed it I'd be prompted to insert another DVD, however I was not. Instead I saw something mysterious in the tray and when I clicked it it was a message prompting me to activate the TPM for the computer. I hesitated, thinking that if I did this I might have difficulties when I reinsert the 640GB HD with Windows 7 on it. However, seeing nothing else offered I clicked OK and it said I had to restart the machine to make the change. The machine shut down, I restarted it and a message has come up:

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Confirmation
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A configuration change was requested to activate this computer's TPM (Trusted Platform Module).

Press [F10] to activate the TPM. System reboots may occur during process depending on current TPM setting.

Press ESC to reject this change request and continue.
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So, my questions are:

1. What happened to my rescue media? The one DVD-R I wrote to is named CD_ROM ( ! ) and it has only 594MB of data written to it! Surely it will not restore my Vista Business.

2. Should I press F10 or ESC on that screen above?


Thanks for help!

[Muse]

Well, nobody has a word to say. I pressed ESC, rejecting activating the TPM (reason in OP), and went to create recovery discs as above and same result. I suppose this refurb T61 isn't capable of creating a set of recovery discs that will restore the machine to factory defaults. So, it occurs to me I can accomplish nearly the same thing by backing up the OS to an external HD. That's the plan now, and I will then swap out the 100GB HD for the 640GB HD, EOS.

[Neil]

If you have nothing on the drive you care about loosing, as it would appear, then I would restore to factory state from the recovery partition. Once that is done, you will have the opportunity to create recovery media...only once. Apparently that is what was done before you got the machine. Seems to me that the single disk you created was the boot CD only. A T60/61 recovery set includes the boot CD and a DVD with the OS and other data needed to the complete install.

[Muse]

If you have nothing on the drive you care about loosing, as it would appear, then I would restore to factory state from the recovery partition. Once that is done, you will have the opportunity to create recovery media...only once. Apparently that is what was done before you got the machine. Seems to me that the single disk you created was the boot CD only. A T60/61 recovery set includes the boot CD and a DVD with the OS and other data needed to the complete install.

You do that by pressing a key during the boot sequence and go into Rescue and Recovery and choose to restore to Factory Defaults?

[Neil]

That's correct.

[Muse]

That's correct.

Thanks. I knew because I did that on one of my T60s within the last year. I'll do the same with this T61 machine now. In my experience R&R can be sort of confusing. I think it was R&R ver. 3 last time. This time it's ver. 4, probably not very different (?). I'm pretty sure I won't be confused this time. Even if I'm not allowed to create discs after the restore it won't matter much as it turns out. The HD fails SMART and I've therefore decided not to use it as the basic HD for one of my T60s (ordered a new drive last night). I'll set it aside with the restored OS on it in case I want to revert to that on the T61 in the future. Figure it's worth the investment of a couple of writable discs too (i.e. recovery to factory defaults discs).