Lenovo T61 Windows XP Downgrade Experience

We picked up three new Lenovo T61 from a client to prep them with their Line of Business (LoB) apps and for installation onto the client's SBS network.

The T61 comes with Windows Vista Business out of the box, so we were also going to downgrade them.

When we received the boxes, we did some research on the downgrade process. We erroneously picked up on some forum posts that indicated that we were required to call Lenovo to order the downgrade CDs.

This was, of course, before opening up the boxes and having a look at the contents! ;)

Lenovo support was very straight forward. After obtaining some product codes off of the box they sent us the CDs no questions asked.

When the disks arrived - all eight of them - we opened up the T61 boxes to have a look at the laptops. Originally we planned on making copies of the disks to enable us to run all three laptops at the same time. This was not necessary since we discovered that the laptops also came with their own copy of the recovery CD set.

The first thing we noticed was that the set that was sent to us by Lenovo were stamped "Recorded in the USA" as opposed to the set that came in the box with the T61s that was stamped "Recorded in Hong Kong".

Curiosity kill the cat ... :D

Okay ... so, is there a difference in the image contents too? Technically an image should be an image.

So, we downgraded two of the laptops using the in-the-box media (referred to as HKs) and one of the laptops via the media that came directly from Lenovo (referred to as USA).

The first difference was abrupt: After running Rescue & Recovery 3 via the first recovery disk on USA and starting the "recovery" process to factory defaults for the XP downgrade we were prompted to reboot the system to continue the process. The reboot happened without a problem. The HKs on the other hand both erred out on the reboot request in what seemed to be a disk format utility error. We were offered the following button options on the error dialogue: Cancel, Retry, and Ignore. On one we clicked Retry which hung the system indefinitely and required a hard reset (hold the power button for about 10 seconds). On the other we clicked Ignore which caused the machine to pause for about half a minute before rebooting itself and continuing the recovery process. No ill effect seemed apparent after this though.

Once the three laptops finished their post recovery initialization, they seemed to be the same desktop wise, but there were some initial subtle differences. The HKs would pop up OS information bubbles at the same time while the USA would not. There were a couple of post SBS domain Windows Update hiccups on the HKs where the USA seemed to accept the changes and run through the Windows Updates smoothly.

There were a number of other anomalies associated with the LoB apps too. The LoBs installed with little or no issue on the USA but set themselves up differently on the HKs which was really odd. We saw some errors out of the LoBs on the HKs that we have not seen in years from those particular applications.

When it came time to run the Lenovo built in software updates, all three were asking to download 1.6GB each or more! That, in and of itself, is pretty scary ... especially for those who are charged by the bit or in our client's case, have a small bandwidth Internet connection.

Also, keep in mind that two of the updates required by the Lenovo software are two Windows XP hotfixes that should be applied before adding the T61s to the SBS domain: Lenovo (& Others) XP Specific Updates: Hotfixes required via Product Support Services (previous blog post).

If the hotfixes are not applied before adding the T61s to the domain, one needs to log on to the unit as a domain admin before the hotfix will allow itself to be installed citing insufficient admin rights.

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.

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.

Lenovo Rescue & Recovery experience

One of our clients started purchasing Lenovo laptops a while back via a friend of one of the partners.

The laptop in question is a T60 1951-58U. Its 60 GB Toshiba manufactured hard drive, yes Toshiba makes them, crashed. No FAT/MFT, and our data mule took over an hour to boot up with the Toshiba drive slaved to the system. We did manage to get the data back!

Our client made a Rescue & Recovery image to an external USB hard drive over a month ago.

The laptop is under warranty, but we supplied a new Seagate Momentus to get them up and running quickly. Or so I thought.

Reading through the Lenovo Rescue & Recovery documentation, we booted the laptop up via the USB hard drive, ran the Rescue & Recovery utility and initiated a system restore via the image stored on the USB hard drive.

We ran that "restore my entire hard drive from the backup image" as many ways as we could to get it to work.

The Rescue partition happily made its way onto the new hard drive, as did the Windows partition, but it would not boot. There was no guarantee that everything was there either.

Reboot the system once the recovery was finished, and we were greeted with a blank screen and a cursor blinking in the top left corner - every time we tried to do a full restore from image on the system.

What part of simple did we miss here? There were absolutely no clues as to why the backup image would not take.

It is, after all, Lenovo's native restore utility. One who follows the instructions contained in it to restore the system should not have to sit there looking at a blank screen with a blinking cursor after mucking around with the system for an hour.

We called Lenovo's warranty support line and the person we spoke to didn't even know the Rescue & Restore utility could do that!?!?!

After telling us that it was not possible for 15 minutes, the "support technician" finally put us on hold for 10 minutes after which they came back and told us with utter lack of conviction that we needed to do a factory image restore from the CD/DVD disks first.

We were fortunate that our client had a few of these laptops in their office as we were able to generate the DVDs from one of them.

So, we are running the image based restore now, after running the "Restore to Factory Default Condition" three times. Yes, the first two times the Rescue & Recovery utility kept crashing during the factory restoration process. :(

A huge disappointment for us towards Lenovo.

The final run through the image restore portion has finished. And, guess what?

The laptop is back to where it was at when the image was made.

Given the amount of grief we had getting it there, it would have been quicker to rebuild the thing.

Lessons learned. :D

UPDATE 07-06-29: We found that the machine account was no longer in synch with the SBS server, so the SBS server would not allow the user to logon giving a "not connected to the domain" error message.

We had to break the domain relationship, create a new machine name with the SBS wizard, and reconnect the system to the domain via that SBS/connectcomputer site.

Always make sure you know the local admin password. If you don't or are not sure, change the password in Users & Groups on the local machine.

We were fortunate that the user's existing domain profile was actually picked up when they logged in to the SBS domain for the first time after breaking the domain relationship. Thus, no desktop preferences or domain profile settings were lost.

A couple of OST "Out of date" problem messages from Outlook were encountered. All the user needed to do was close and reopen Outlook and hit Send/Receive to fix it.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

System Builder Tip: Laptops - Make a Factory Default DVD Set for Recovery

We have been selling a good number of Acer laptops, and now that Toshiba has caught up with the Core 2 technology, and Toshibas.

Lately, to save a few bucks, manufacturers of laptops have been putting recovery images on a partition that is only accessible via the Make Backup CD/DVD Utility.

If the laptop's hard drive dies before that utility has been run to create the backup disks, one has a real problem.

When we receive a new laptop model, we always run through a prep process including updating the operating system and any applications that are installed on it.

We now also run the CD/DVD backup utility to create a set of factory default DVD images for that model. In the process, we always make sure to never check the, "Do not show this again" option.

We then remind our client to make a set of factory default disks as soon as they get it to the office or home.

We picked up a couple of extra large 14" x 14" CD wallets that we keep all of our recovery disks in.

The DVD Recovery disks we make are notarized with the system manufacturer, model number, and last 5 or 6 digits of the serial number. That way I can quickly look up who the disks belong to when we get a laptop for hard drive warranty.

It always helps to be prepared. One never knows when one will hear, "I don't know what happen to those disks," or, "what disks?"

Doing this has paid for itself.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists