Problems on a T23 doing a product recovery

[Foldncrease]

I have an old T23 (2647 4MU) that I have put alot of miles on and I decided to rebuild it. It had a cracked palmrest, missing keyes, chunks gone off various bezels and paint peeling of doors on the bottom. After learning ebay, I aquired all the parts and rebuilt it. The thing worked, suprisingly, except for one problem I wanted to correct: The battery would not charge. I researched and found out that this is probably a bad motherboard. So back to ebay, I found a T23 motherboard. It was more than just the motherboard, it was the board, processor, bottom shell, fan, etc. Pretty much the bottom 2/3rd of another T23. So I swapped all the parts over and made a new T23. This one is a 2647 8MU. It came with Win XP originally, the first T23 coming with Win 2000.

I want to go the final step and restore the software.  I had installed Win XP over the Win 2000 a few years back and recently found out I did it wrong, not saving the ibm tools file separately. I bought a set of recovery disks for a 2647 8MU from Lenovo and ran them The problem is, it didn't work. They didn't do anything. I'm not sure the issue, I think it's because the HDD is from the Win 2000 computer and the disks are for the Win XP computer. How do I get this done? Wipe the disk clean? If this is the answer, how do I do that since the product recovery disks won't.

[tfflivemb2]

HI, welcome to the forum.

Yes, you have to format the disk prior to using the Recovery Disks, otherwise it will cause problems.

You can wipe the disk with many programs, but I either use a Win98 disk or ActiveKillDisk on my Ultimate Boot Disk from ultimatebootcd.com.

[Foldncrease]

Thanks for confirming what I thought. This may be a dumb question, but the product recovery disks I got from IBM have Windows XP on them, right?

[andyP Community SuperMod]

AFAIK recovery cds which come from IBM cannot be ordered without a s/n. They will be the cds for the COA windows license which is on the underside of your T23. It should also be written on the cds for which OS they are - W2K or XP.

[Foldncrease]

Thanks again Andy. Now it wasx suggested above that I wipe the drive clean. after I do that, do I just put in the bootable product recovery CD or does the hard drive need to be formatted?

Robert

[andyP Community SuperMod]

The disks should take care of everything for you.

[Foldncrease]

Thanks again, Andy. I used the Active Killz program and in 30 minutes it had wiped the hard drive clean. The recovery disks installed without a problem. Of course, the biggest time consumer was getting the updates installed from windows update. That took hours.

[andyP Community SuperMod]

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Foldncrease wrote:

...snip..the biggest time consumer was getting the updates installed from windows update. That took hours.

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I know, been there - seen it and I've got the T-Shirt, it's excruciatingly boring

[tfflivemb2]

Glad to hear that it worked out for you.  It would be nice if the formatting option was included in the Recovery process, because this is a very common problem that people have.  They assume that the Recovery Disks do EVERYTHING, and they don't.

[Foldncrease]

Well, now I know for the future what the capability of my recovery disks are. The next question that comes to mind is having a convenient way of determining what updates from the Lenovo website would be good to install and what doesn't really make a difference.