[ltp] T42 Win XP RescueRecovery from CD hung

[Florence Berbain]

Kelvin KAN wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I finally bought the T42 with nice a 1400x1050 screen, even though it 
> is 1-lb heavier than my current Fujitsu Lifebook-S which has so many 
> non-fatal defects already.
>
> So to prepare a backdoor to fallback to factory-installed XP, before 
> playing around with Linux, I made a backup of the RescueRecovery 
> partition, using the built-in tool in WinXP's AccessIBM program 
> folder.   To be 100% sure the set of 7 CDs worked, I even tried to 
> verify the  restoration by booting from those CDs.
>
> That's where the nightmare began.  On finishing reading the last CDs, 
> it requested me to reboot.  And on accepting all the yes/no 
> confirmation questions, then it tried to patient me by prompting:
>    Rescue Recovery in Progress.  This may take a few minutes.
>    Total Progress ...
>
> And it'd never progressed, stopped  at a few % of the progress bar.  
> Re-attempting the whole recovery process did not help.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
Hi,

I don't really have suggestions, but I can share my Recovery CDs 
experience, for what it's worth:

I did like you on my T42p, and the Recovery from CD took a really 
loooong time. Unfortunately I can't remember which stages were longest, 
but I remember seeing the Rescue Recovery in Progress progress bar not 
moving at all for very long stretches of time.

What the Recovery CDs also did: they didn't work the first time. Nor the 
second. The first and second time, the process went to the point where 
it asked me if I really wanted to destroy everything on my disk and 
proceed with recovery. After I said yes, it then said it couldn't go on 
(and again I'm sorry I forgot the exact error message). At that stage I 
had no system left, not even the linux distribution I had previously 
installed (I checked with a Knoppix CD).

The third time it worked, and as I said it was a very long process.

So now, I'm not so sure I want to use the Recovery CDs anyway, because I 
don't know how to Recover without destroying my linux partitions (from a 
thread on a Debian list I had understood that the Recovery CDs would 
only reformat the first 2 partitions on my disk. So my linux partitions 
started at the 3rd one. But in my experience everything got wiped all 
the same).

I think the next time I will need to reinstall Windows, to avoid losing 
my linux system I will do so from a normal WinXP CD, and then copy the 
IBM utilities I backed up on CD to this install. I hope this will work 
better.

Groetjes,
Florence