Hot deal! Get them while they last! For a limited time only IBM is shipping you ThinkPad recovery CDs absolutely free of charge due to a software glitch that cropped up in their latest ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery software.
A little background: IBM doesn’t ship their ThinkPads with any recovery CDs, but they have a handy utility that lets you create your own as a backup in case the hard drive’s hidden recovery partition is lost. If you want to get the official, factory-pressed CDs, they’ll run you nearly $50 after their mandatory next-day air shipping charges.
Now I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about the “bring your own CD” tactics taken by Lenovo/IBM, but I’ve never had a problem until this weekend. I’d recently burned a recovery CD and DVD, and was attempting to restore a ThinkPad to factory condition when I got a ton of the following errors:
PKUNZIP: (W10) Warning! can't create: C:/IBMTOOLS/... PKUNZIP: Incorrect password for file ... PKUNZIP: Inconsistent local header for file ...
Now this is interesting, because the media is checked after being written by the ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery software to avoid bad burns. In fact, it’s detected a couple of bad images before, so I came to expect that once it clears the media, I’m good to go. Just to be safe, I checked the hard drive’s health using Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test, and completely wiped it clean using DBAN, but even after taking those precautions the restore would fail.
I gave up and called IBM-SERV, and before I was done describing the problem, they admitted there was a known problem and they’d be shipping me new restore CDs. Not bad, since these are usually so expensive to come by, and I’m not going to be set back by having to wait another day to receive the shipment.
As an end-user, I’m glad Lenovo/IBM owned up to the issue and was honest about the issue causing the problem. While I’m not in much of a hurry, I don’t envy their position of having to deal with frantic users trying to get their ThinkPad back up and running ASAP, only to find their recovery CDs are now landfill bound.
12 Comments
Hi,
Is it possible for you to send me the CDs or give me the link from which I can download the ISO images of these CDs.
regards,
Gaurav
Confirmed. I had to BS the tech for 1/2 hour, and get imaginative with which steps happened when & why, but I played it cool and eventually got sent a new set of CDs.
Very cool, saved me $45 for something that should’ve been included in the first place.
The tech that I talked to said that I would have to pay $45 for the CDs, even after I told him a story about my malfunctioning Rescue CD.
Along the same lines as Gaurav’s comment, could you or someone with the CDs set up a torrent or some other download location? Heck, I’d set up a torrent if I could get my hands on them.
I was given my ThinkPad and the previous owner had decided to do a little dabbling in Linux. Of course, he never made any Rescue CDs and he also decided to remove the service partition to take full advantage of his hard drive. $45 is more than I paid for the actual laptop.
IBM made different Rescue CDs for different models. I sincerely doubt that one meant for my X31 type 2672 would work for any other (heck, it wouldn’t even let me use a non-IBM usb CD-ROM to install them!) In addition, different models came with different software options. You’re either going to have to pay the $45, or improve your social engineering skills. Hint – don’t say that you have a malfunctioning Rescue CD, say you used the built-in recovery software to back up your computer, then later tried to reuse that image, only to find your computer now refuses to boot, even to the recovery area. This places the blame on malfunctioning recovery software, not on lost/scratched/otherwise unusable CDs, which Lenovo doesn’t have to take responsibility for.
Or you could just stick with Linux.
What version of ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery backup tool was included with your X31. So that I know what version was the offending culprit?
I would also be interested in those cd’s!
Me too…can I get it if I bought my laptop used? Where do you get it?
i was trying to burn music to my cd after that the cd reads unusable is the any software that can be used to restore it back to its normal state it reads 0 bytes when put into my rom
Get all your thinkpad recovery cds from
http://www.thinkpadrecoverycds.com
the link seems broken …
hey my name is donaven and a buddy of mine gave me 2 of these ibm thinkpads and i cant loggin to one of them can you help cuz i have tryed EVERYTHING my e-mail address is pimpstuff321@gmail.com
Download the ophcrack liveCD (http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/) and
recover the passwords.
Oliver