T42 Restore Factory State problem

Question

Hello fellow thinkpad-ers,
I am trying to help out a friend, who had her laptop formatted by some idiot, that
didnʼt know about Thinkpads Restore Factory State option. It seems that he
formatted it, and installed some pirated copy of XP...
In Disk Manager, I can still see the hidden partition, but when booting the machine,
and pressing the blue button I cant access the utility.
It gives me a list of 3 options:
-ESC
-F1 for bios utility
-F12 to select boot device
I also have a T42, but it’s a different model. I once tried my disks
on a T41 that I was trying to revive, and they didn’t work...
and was later told by IBM that each machine has unique disks.
I am assuming that the guy that did the "damage" formatted only
C:/ and then installed the pirated XP there, since I can still see the
hidden partition in the Disk Manager... So this makes me think
that the Blue Button menu resides on the C:/ part of the disk.
How could I copy just that, off of a different T42?
Anyone have any idea how to get around ordering the recovery CDs from IBM?
Thanks!
Sutherland

Answer 1

Thumper wrote:
I also have a T42, but it’s a different model. I once tried my disks
on a T41 that I was trying to revive, and they didn’t work...
and was later told by IBM that each machine has unique disks.
Whoever told you this was mistaken.  With the exception of hardware changes (eg modem from T41 to T42) the disks within a series should work just fine (I've just recovered aT41 with my T42 CDs).  The only difference in using early T42 recovery with a later T42 is the fingerprint reader.  Later T42 disks should work just fine with an early T42.  Go ahead and use your T42 disks on her machine.
Keith
Formerly 600E 2645, T30 2366, X31 2673, T40 2373, T41 2379, T42 2373, T42 2379, T60 1952, T61p 8889, T61p 8891
Currently T420 4177-CTO, T430 2347-A54, T430 2349-L64, T430 2347-UN9, T430 2342-CTR, Ideapad K1, H520S 2561-1LU