In January, I attended Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. In preperation to this event, I reinstalled my Thinkpad T43p in order to have a clean, lean and battery efficient system for the conference. So far, so good.

During the first day in Orlando, I tweaked my system a little bit during the session breaks. Unfortunately, I somehow changed the wrong option and everything went wrong. I could log on, but Windows XP immediately logged me off again – even in restricted mode.

Damn. I had an important Web Conference in the next morning and I somehow had to get my system running again. No Rescue CDs, no Knoppix Live CD no backups with me.

Fortunately, I always split my harddisks up in at least two parts and keep my data on an additional partition. So while Windows and all the programs reside on C:, my Data and all the stuff inside „Documents and Settings” resides on D:. Therefore I copied the most important data to my external USB drive and decided to give Lenovos „ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery” a go and reinstall the „factory settings”.

To my pleasant surprise, Rescue and Recovery (RnR) did not repartition the harddrive. It only installed Windows to C: (after asking several times, if I am sure). Within 30 Minutes, I had a running and workable Windows XP installation back up again. A little tweaking and „Documents and Settings” was on D: again.

After about an hour, I had my Thinkpad in a state where I could have one my Web Conference. Thank you IBM/Lenovo.

That I stayed up until 2 am to reinstall all the tools and applications I needed, is a different story. Oh - and now I have a RnR-Backup of my C-Drive with all the installed applications on my USB drive. Should something like this happen again, it will only take about 45 minutes to reinstall my system with all applications and data intact.

My personal advice: Invest some time to get acquainted with Lenovos ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery product! It will pay off.

BTW: Matt Kohut has posted a nice article on „Lenovo Blogs” whether Rescue and Recovery Is Needed on Vista or not. So far, I haven’t got it running on Vista. But I will keep you posted.

Tagged as: Ein_Tag_im_Leben, ibm, lenovo, RnR, software, thinkpad, thinkvantage, vista, windows | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20070211, 18:21 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)