Rescue and Recovery after installing a Vista OEM

[Hyldahl]

Hi...

I have a T60 (2007-FVG) originally bought with Win Xp, and 2 years after I bought it, I have upgraded the OS to a OEM win vista. Now i wan't to recover the computer to factory state with Win XP using the blue ThinkVantage button during start-up.

Here comes the problem, when i press the ThinkVantage button, in stead of getting in to the Rescue and Recovery menu, i just get a boot-menu where i can chosse to boot up from the harddrive, or the CD-rom drive. How can i get to the R&R-menu so i can recover the computer to factory state?

Regards

Per Hyldahl

[MarkATL · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the forum Hyldahl,

Couple of things here.

1) This unit orginally came preloaded with XP.  So that means that XP was also the OS that was loaded on the original partition. With these Thinkpads, customers have the ability to create their own set of rcds. You would normally follow this path:

Start->Programs->ThinkVantage->Create Recovery Media 

Information on creating the RCDs can be found on this link:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-68317

Did you already create a set of your own XP RCDs before installing Vista?

2) If you installed the Vista RCDs and didn't create your XP RCDs first, the XP recovery partition will be replaced by the Vista recovery partition. 

My guess is that you didn't create your own RCDs yet. If this is the case, you would need to obtain a copy of the original RCDs for XP. You can try and contact your local tech support to obtain a copy of the XP RCDs.

3) To restore Windows to the orginal factory state, you would start by booting the machine and pressing the F11 key (or just boot from the orginal R&R cd). View the following link for the step by step guide to using Rescue and Recovery to recover Windows:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-70803

Hopefully this will cover everything to get you started. Let me know if you need any additional assistance.

Cheers,

Mark

[Hyldahl]

Thanks for the quick reply...

Yeah, you're quite right i did'nt create the RCD's before installing vista. As it was a "None-lenovo" version of vista i bought in a computer retail-store, i thought that i kept the R&R partition with Win Xp so i at any time could restore the laptop to factory state with Win Xp.

I will try to contact Lenovo support and have them send me some original RCD's with Win Xp to recover the system to Win Xp.

Thanks..

/Per Hyldahl

[MarkATL]

You're welcome. Glad I was able to solve your problem

Mark