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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:

1 PKUNZIP: (W10) Warning! can't create: C:/IBMTOOLS/...
2 PKUNZIP: Incorrect password for file ...
3 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.