T60 with "dual boot": how to use Rescue&Recovery partition

[BigCatAndy]

Hello dear community,
I have following situation: I own T60, which came with valid Recovery Partition. I restored Windows XP of it, and then installed Linux on it (resizing Windows XP partition). GRUB added R&R-partition to the list, everything fine so far.

Now I want to use R&R again and restore Windows XP completely. Unfortunately, it fails. When I start R&R environment and say "Restore system", it reports - after some seconds - that several partitions where found, and asks if I want to restore partitions C:\, or the whole drive. When I choose "whole drive", it starts to restore, and breaks after several seconds with an error.

Here is my question: how can I restore WindowsXP from R&R in the case of dual boot?

I would appreciate any hint on it.

Regards,
Andrey

[BigCatAndy]

Hello,
update on my own post: I occasionally messed up my partitions, so now I have only "IBM_SERVICE" partition and Rescue & Recovery fails to restore from it. So, I would be happy to get any hint how to enable use of the recovery partition.

Cheers,
Andrey

Hello dear community,
I have following situation: I own T60, which came with valid Recovery Partition. I restored Windows XP of it, and then installed Linux on it (resizing Windows XP partition). GRUB added R&R-partition to the list, everything fine so far.

Now I want to use R&R again and restore Windows XP completely. Unfortunately, it fails. When I start R&R environment and say "Restore system", it reports - after some seconds - that several partitions where found, and asks if I want to restore partitions C:\, or the whole drive. When I choose "whole drive", it starts to restore, and breaks after several seconds with an error.

Here is my question: how can I restore WindowsXP from R&R in the case of dual boot?

I would appreciate any hint on it.

Regards,
Andrey

[dr_st]

I occasionally messed up my partitions, so now I have only "IBM_SERVICE" partition and Rescue & Recovery fails to restore from it.

So, wait, now you cannot boot any of your operating systems?

I recall that R&R always had problems with dual-boot. However, as long as the R&R partition is marked "active" and you can boot from it, it should be able to restore the entire drive (but will wipe and dual-boot OS you had in the process).

Not sure what to do at this point, but the general advice (for the future) is to create a set of recovery disks as soon as you restored the factory OS. This way you have a copy of your R&R partition and can restore from the disks if something ever messes up the partitions on the drive.

[BigCatAndy]

Hello

So, wait, now you cannot boot any of your operating systems?

This laptop was not really in use, so it is not critical. But yes, I cannot. Actually, there are no OS partitions at all, because I - occasionally - deleted them by GPartEd.

I recall that R&R always had problems with dual-boot. However, as long as the R&R partition is marked "active" and you can boot from it, it should be able to restore the entire drive (but will wipe and dual-boot OS you had in the process).

This would be OK, but R&R even does not try. After approximately 4-5 seconds it says "Product Recovery failed to restore system" - without explaining details.

Not sure what to do at this point, but the general advice (for the future) is to create a set of recovery disks as soon as you restored the factory OS. This way you have a copy of your R&R partition and can restore from the disks if something ever messes up the partitions on the drive.

Actually, the HDD is completely useless. I found a set of ISO images for T60, I download them now. I hope, this will help me.

One question: should I start with "R&R_bootable"-disk?

Regards,
Andrey

[dr_st]

One question: should I start with "R&R_bootable"-disk?

The first one in the set of ISO images should be a bootable R&R disk. When you run the recovery from those CDs/DVDs, the state of your hard drive should not matter - it will wipe all partitions and recreate them from scratch.

[BigCatAndy]

Hello,

The first one in the set of ISO images should be a bootable R&R disk. When you run the recovery from those CDs/DVDs, the state of your hard drive should not matter - it will wipe all partitions and recreate them from scratch.

I could recover Windows XP using found ISOs, but this English Windows XP. Not critical, I will use Linux anyway.

But I really would like how I can "re-enable" IBM_SERVICE partition. I mean, this nothing else than all ISOs together.

Regards,
Andrey