Saturday 29 December 2007

Lenovo T60 - Recovering to Factory Default

A while back, we worked on recovering a Lenovo T60 from a crashed hard drive via the built-in Lenovo backup/recovery tools: Lenovo Rescue & Recovery experience.

Given our struggles to recover the laptop via the Lenovo Rescue & Recovery (R&R) to the most recent backup that our client had, we were expecting more of the same when we had another T60 come to us.

In this case, the laptop had a Trojan infection. Given the nature of the infection, we flattened the system.

Because we do not have any R&R system backups to recover from, we needed to restore the laptop to factory defaults and build up from there.

We were fortunate that we made a copy of the T60's recovery DVDs at the time of the last image as this machine could not be trusted to generate clean recovery disks.

After booting the first R&R disk to initiate the Factory Default recovery process, we were able to find our way to restoring to default.

Once we had made our selection though and we were told to remove the disk from the drive and click OK, nothing happened other than the OK window disappearing. The machine was left on the bench for about 10 minutes with no further action by the laptop to reboot.

We had to force power the unit down by holding the power button for about 5-10 seconds.

The R&R environment came up again, and asked us to insert the Boot Disk 1 again which we did. It rejected the disk and asked for Boot Disk 1 again. This time we put in the Product Recovery disk 1 in and it seemed to be happy.

Once the recovery process finished and we booted into the OS we still had to wait for the configuration scripts to run which took quite a while.

Keep in mind that besides the needed Microsoft Updates, the Lenovo update feature will need to be run and there will be a lot of Lenovo updates to pull down. In this case, with the optional and some of the features updates we hit 660MB.

All in all, in our experience, the Lenovo R&R setup needs to be refined. From poor documentation or instructions, to the R&R environment's own inability to follow through on our click commands, there is a lot of room for improvement.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

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