Thinkpad partition question

[L337Llama]

I own a T60 with XP on it, and my school gives me licenses for xp and vista. I'm thinking of reformatting and installing with one of my copies of windows instead of using the think vantage button and restoring from the hidden partition. The question I have is if installing with one my cd's, is it going to overwrite that hidden parition or keep the thinkvantage button from working? And will I be able to get all the drivers? Like battery manager and the thinkpad software.

Thanks.

 

[IlllI]

check the website and dl the drivers first then save them on a usb drive or something. its less of a hassle that way
also when reformatting it will show that tiny partition. the small one and the main one. it will give you the option to delete either one

 

[AsianriceX]

Do yourself a favor and use the Rescue and Recovery software to burn yourself the *Factory* restore discs if you haven't already. If you're a stingy person like I am, note that the first disc can be a CD-R and the rest can be DVD-R/+R. The first disc holds the RnR recovery environment, the rest hold the restore data.

Then hit up these links after you reinstall to grab what you need:
T60 Square
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62928
T60 Widescreen
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-67026

 

[DarkRogue]

I'll echo Asianrice's advice - highly recommended to make a backup of some sort, at the very least the restore discs before you nuke the partition away.
I have done this myself on my T60. After you've nuked it and installed your OS of preference, just go to the Lenovo site and download all the necessary drivers and programs you want. Not all of them are required, so I took the chance before I nuked my hard drive to try out every single application/driver that was available for download for my particular Thinkpad and made a list of everything that seemed useful enough to keep, or useless enough to do without. After the nuke, I simply followed the list to get exactly what I wanted to keep, and I essentially got a very clean, bloat-free laptop out of it with all the goodness of IBM/Lenovo.

The Thinkvantage button will still work post-nuke, but it won't have many options since the hidden partition will no longer exist if you remove it.

 

[corkyg]

Echo again what Dark Rogue said. I have a T60 now going on two years. You might want to do this (I did.)

Get a new, bigger, faster HDD and install on it and leave your old one as a "reserve." That way you have a quick recourse to problems and can do a fresh install with any OS you like. Downloading the Lenovo drivers, etc. works - and the blue button's main functions will be preserved.

 

[deros68]

Darn it - I wish I had created an R&R disk before I deleted my small IBM default partition. I had to reformat my T60 type 2623 HDD and while trying to do multiple things at once I did not notice that I deleted all partitions and formatted the WHOLE HDD. I tried installing XP-SP3 on this image - but duirng the install I got multiple errors saying that it could not find: Mouse system etc..

I have all the T60 drivers from the Lenovo site for the box and I can re-install XP as I need to.

Would it work if I created a CD with ALL the drivers on it and inserted it at the F6 prompt on install ? I have never had to do this before and am wondering if I need to create the DRIVER CD with a file structire like the drivers create when they are extracted: c:\driver\win\audio etc - of course the file structure would be the CD - std data format ?

Has anyone else ever done this ?

I think that what was on the small parititon was IBM drivers and the IBM bloatware -is that correct ? So if I can supply the necessary drivers at install - I can get my T60 back !!!

thanks for listening

 

[WackyDan]

Do yourself a favor and use the Rescue and Recovery software to burn yourself the *Factory* restore discs if you haven't already. If you're a stingy person like I am, note that the first disc can be a CD-R and the rest can be DVD-R/+R. The first disc holds the RnR recovery environment, the rest hold the restore data.

Then hit up these links after you reinstall to grab what you need:
T60 Square
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62928
T60 Widescreen
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-67026

Good advice... But I'll throw this in... The factory partition sometimes doesn't contain the factory preload. Sometimes customers pay to have Lenovo put their own (read the school's image) custom image in that partition and recover via the same method. Sometimes, the customer uses a tool Lenovo provides to do that themselves.

If under the ThinkVantage program group you have the option to create recovery media and a rescue disk, then it is probably the true factory preload.

Once you load your new Win install (you can have it leave that partition alone), just download two things... the Ethernet driver from the support site and System Update from my link below....

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=TVSU-UPDATE

System Update will publish all the latest drivers and utilities in the app, along with specific windows updates that are specifically relevant to a ThinkPad. Do not download drivers from the Windows Update site.

 

[WackyDan]

Darn it - I wish I had created an R&R disk before I deleted my small IBM default partition. I had to reformat my T60 type 2623 HDD and while trying to do multiple things at once I did not notice that I deleted all partitions and formatted the WHOLE HDD. I tried installing XP-SP3 on this image - but duirng the install I got multiple errors saying that it could not find: Mouse system etc..

I have all the T60 drivers from the Lenovo site for the box and I can re-install XP as I need to.

Would it work if I created a CD with ALL the drivers on it and inserted it at the F6 prompt on install ? I have never had to do this before and am wondering if I need to create the DRIVER CD with a file structire like the drivers create when they are extracted: c:\driver\win\audio etc - of course the file structure would be the CD - std data format ?

Has anyone else ever done this ?

I think that what was on the small parititon was IBM drivers and the IBM bloatware -is that correct ? So if I can supply the necessary drivers at install - I can get my T60 back !!!

thanks for listening

Seriously... Use Lenovo's system Update from the link I posted. It is a fairly smart tool. It will install everything in the right order if there are dependencies and you get to choose only what drivers and utilities you want on the system.

 

[WackyDan]

Let me add one more thing.

Instead of burning up one of your existing windows licenses... if you want to use the same OS as the factory recovery... then use the factory recovery via the tool below.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=TVAN-ADMIN#TBSA

Lenovo's Base Software Administrator works on XP and Vista Preloads... To understand how it works you need to understand how Lenovo's preloads were built.

Lenovo's Preloads are not static compressed images, but are modular images. There is intelligence built into the image deploy that uses not only PnP but machine model information from the bios to determine what drivers and apps get installed.

Think of it this way... A preload recovery for a Lenovo is actually an operating system install, driver install, and app/utility install that is just automated and that is why it takes so long. (IBM/Lenovo were doing modular images/installs before anyone else in the industry)

So... You run the Base Software Admin tool, and you are able to turn off all the installers for drivers, OS components, Utilities, thinkvantage tools, etc. Doing it this way gives you a system that is built with XP or Vista but is as virgin as you installing it yourself, except you end up with just the core drivers to update and perhaps the DVD authoring software that is so hard to find.

If any of you want to try that let me know... I could write a book on it.

(If any of the above sounds like a commercial it is because I was a sales engineer for Lenovo up until Mid-2010. Just trying to help )

 

[flensr]

I like the idea of buying a second hard drive before doing any of this... My original t41p hard drive went from just fine to unreadable in less than a day, and I ended up losing the whole thing including the recovery partition. I had been unable to burn that partition to CD earlier (it would burn a "recovery cd" that needed the info on the partition) and lenovo told me that my only option would be to buy a new OEM drive for a couple hundred bucks. For less than the price of the oem drive (60gb 7200 rpm) I bought a brand new 320GB WDC scorpio blue and an OEM license of win7 pro. The scorpio blue is significantly faster than that old oem drive even though the scorpio blue is a 5400 rpm drive, and I was able to get pretty much everything working again with the built-in win7 drivers and a handful of driver downloads from lenovo.

So I'd suggest removing the original drive and putting it in a safe place, and then buying the fastest drive that will work in that T60 and putting your new OS on the new drive. If the t60 still uses IDE drives like the t41 series did, then you're going to be limited to just a handful of choices. I shopped around and the scorpio blue drives are only 5400rpm but they're faster than most older 7200rpm laptop drives and don't cost very much either. I use 2 of them and they're about as fast as it gets for ide laptop drives, are quiet/cool, and neither has failed after over a year of use travelling around in my laptop (one in an ultrabay slim removable chassis so it gets banged around a bit every time I swap it in or out for the optical drive).

 

[deros68]

@WackyDan

Thanks for sharing your expertise - if I get the box rebuilt to the point where it will boot - I will follow your advice. I did NOT post enough of the problem above,... my bad .. After the partition format when I try to install xp-sp2 or xp-sp3 the install starts, runs fine - until I get a message for each of these : Windows installer cannot load CDROM, then Mouse, then HARD Drive, then SYSTEM. But the darn install does finish. When I boot up the first time - the Windows Login splash screen comes up - then - BSOD. I do not even get a DUMP. The machine re-starts - I and I get the SAFE boot screen. When I try safe boot - BSOD immediately. I also ran the default BIOS HDD diagnostic program with NO errors. I am using the our generic XP/SPx install CDs - so I know that they are good - just to make sure I installed it on a T40 - successfully- THIS T40 HAS the original IBM small parition on the HDD. I am going to try the following: - using GHOST for Linux I will make a image copy of another T60P HDD to another external HDD - boot this (the bad t60) to GHOST for Linux and try to copy the other t60 disk image to this one. The other t60 is the same - minus some application software that I can re-build.

I thank you and everyone who replied - I am just left wondering why the loss of that small partiton caused my XP install (3 times 2 xp-sp3 and 1 xp-sp2) to go wrong? This is one of those situations where I do not know what I don't know....

 

[deros68]

I thank everyone who replied on this list. I had such strange errors that I went back to the basics: HDD diagnostics and then memtest86 - !@#$^!^%!#!@#

Subsitute curse words above - memtest86 showed an uncorrectable memory error - which from my research is located where XP loads memory management modules - just 1 location BAD (byte) - Thus every time any application consumed LOTS of virtual memory - I got a dump. I was not suspicious of Hardware since I had just UNINSTALLED vmware workstation - which in prior releases left me in DLL HELL and I started to get occasional BSODs. I then started looking at video drivers - and then updated my FIREGL driver - which did not seem to make any difference. I then rolled back enough drivers that I had to re-install XP to start over. That is when I accidentally deleted the IBM partition and eventually led me to do the basics - verify that the hardware was working: HDD & memtest !!

Wow - the up side to all this is I that learned more about the way Thinkpads are put togather via the Lenovo process. However my experience demonstrates the value of a common theme I see in the thread above - TAKE BACKUPS

thanks

 

[WackyDan]

I thank everyone who replied on this list. I had such strange errors that I went back to the basics: HDD diagnostics and then memtest86 - !@#$^!^%!#!@#

Subsitute curse words above - memtest86 showed an uncorrectable memory error - which from my research is located where XP loads memory management modules - just 1 location BAD (byte) - Thus every time any application consumed LOTS of virtual memory - I got a dump. I was not suspicious of Hardware since I had just UNINSTALLED vmware workstation - which in prior releases left me in DLL HELL and I started to get occasional BSODs. I then started looking at video drivers - and then updated my FIREGL driver - which did not seem to make any difference. I then rolled back enough drivers that I had to re-install XP to start over. That is when I accidentally deleted the IBM partition and eventually led me to do the basics - verify that the hardware was working: HDD & memtest !!

Wow - the up side to all this is I that learned more about the way Thinkpads are put togather via the Lenovo process. However my experience demonstrates the value of a common theme I see in the thread above - TAKE BACKUPS

thanks

My wife has a T60... I can check and see if she is running the preload... Funny, as I built the dang thing, but I forgot.

If you need it, I can check and burn a copy of the recovery disks... I may even have a set here. PM Me.