Mon 19 Sep 2005
As I posted a week or so ago, an errant uninstaller corrupted my new tablet’s registry. While this was extremely unfortunate for me, because I was forced to work the rest of the day with a pen and paper, I did have a fairly good experience with both IBM’s support, and the IBM Rescue and Recovery (RnR) Software.
First, the bad news: RnR was not able to recover my registry. This is not entirely the fault of the system however, as I had not yet created backup discs or created an image of the system to directly restore to - that was my fault. I ended up having to restore to the factory state of the system.
But, the good news: RnR allowed me to rescue ALL my documents to a USB stick, and I didn’t lose a single piece of work. After booting into the RnR interface by pressing the big blue button on my tablet, I was quickly greeted with an interface that presented me with lots of options.
Using the rescue portion, I was able to see the entire contents of my hard drive and copy any files I needed to a USB thumb drive I have. Lucky for me I knew what I wanted, because the software doesn’t have a list of common places for personal files, or anything that would lead an un-savvy user in the right direction. In any event, I saved everything I needed - not a moment lost.
After triggering the ‘restore to factory contents’ option of the recover menu [GN2]
the system went on autopilot for about half an hour, working hard and rebooting about 10-20 times. [GN3]
After the script was finished, the system rebooted once more, and I was greeted with the “Welcome to Windows XP TPC” setup screen, and was able to re-enter all my personal information to setup the tablet. After confirming the system was in fact working again, I reinstalled Office and OneNote, copied my documents back from my USB stick, and was back up and running within about 2 hours (which includes all of the recovery, Windows Update, and core apps installation). Not bad at all.
If I had the foresight to create a back image of my system, I’m sure the downtime would have been even shorter, but the fact that I was able to get from a dead machine to one that I was able to work on again in that short of time is simply amazing to me. I lost no work, and was only out about 3 hours of productivity (the extra hour it took me to translate my paper notes back to my system that night should be included here - I’m after a paperless work life, and keeping those notes around would be counterproductive).
While I am quite disappointed that I was not able to recover my system directly because I did not have access to a normal Windows XP installation disc, I do have to give Lenovo points for it’s amazing RnR software. As an ultra portable, the x41 tablet has no optical drive, and I’m sure most people do not carry their install discs on the road with them anyways, so the ability to recover from a software failure while on the road is invaluable. I do wish there was a way for me to slipstream my Office and OneNote installations into my ‘factory backup’ though. If I were able to do that, I would feel more confident that I could lose my Windows installation while on a trip and still be fine, but the RnR’s ability to rescue my files so that I didn’t lose a minute’s work was truly a life-saver.
One main gotcha that I discovered: Upon re-installing the IBM security software, I was locked out of a couple of my encrypted files. A set of AES encryption keys are written to the IBM security chip when it is initialized, and even though the chip survived the reinstall, the security software overwrote my previous security keys and in the process made it impossible to recover my encrypted files. Without installing that software again, I had no program with which to decrypt the files, a major catch-22. The RnR software doesn’t have the ability to decrypt files either, so I was sunk. I’ve now been told that if I had made a backup of the system after I had originally initialized the security software, I wouldn’t have had a problem.
Now, what have I learned? If your system comes with a great backup program like mine has, you should get off your butt and use it. Don’t wait until you’ve crashed once to make a backup image - do it right now. You can get an external USB HD for under $80 these days, well worth the piece of mind that comes with a way to restore your system to how you like it, not to how the factory gave it to you.
Those of you who read my GeekNotes may have noticed I’m testing in-line notes with this article. I can’t seem to keep WordPress from auto-fixing my code, so it messes up the line breaks. Hopefully I can work that out before the next article is ready. Please let me know if you hate it, love it, or whatever. Thanks.
September 20th, 2005 at 4:56 pm |
Thanks for sharing your experience, Crashless. Though I’ve yet to fully deploy it, you may want to have a look at XPOINT pro - these are the folks that wrote the IBM R&R system. The full version allows greater control over backups & recovery.
When I finally decided to reload my M4, I plan to use XPOINT.
Meanwhile, I enjoy reading your blog. Happy to chat sometime.
Warm regards,
Eric
September 20th, 2005 at 7:28 pm |
Thanks Eric. Your blog has been a great resource for me as I too try to become YABHTU.
XPOINT looks pretty nice, a great option for those who would otherwise have no recovery software to start with. Looking at the feature list, I can see a lot of strategies that it has in common with R&R.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to talk too.
-Vince
December 31st, 2005 at 3:51 pm |
Have you experience a issue where the F11 key is not appearing or functioning to restore a IBM x41 tablet?
January 6th, 2006 at 10:48 am |
I’m not sure I understand your issue Wai Lam. Could you please clarify what problems you’re having?
September 6th, 2006 at 7:54 pm |
Clarify why this registry error
September 6th, 2006 at 8:03 pm |
The exact error was a blue screen during startup that said something like: “Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM”
If you are having issues, you should go to:
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=307545
and see if that helps.
Good luck.
July 29th, 2007 at 9:06 pm |
I had this same problem today. I copied the entire drive (which was only a few folders and loose files) and restored to the beginning. One folder, entitled recovery, is about 3 gigs and is full of what I think are disk images. I was wondering how you unpack these and thought maybe you knew.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:55 am |
I believe you must use the Rescue and Recovery console to unpack those images. If you have previously used the software to create backups, then you will have the option to restore those specific backups.
Otherwise, I think you’ll only have the option of restoring to factory default. It’s most likely that that recovery folder is simply a compressed windows installation image, and if you’ve already restored to factory defaults, there isn’t anything in there that you might need.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:11 pm |
R&R is pretty cool, if used properly, and regularly.
However, There are a lot of people that don’t understand the difference between the IBM/Lenovo R&R application, the R&R boot system, and the BIOS.
It’s important to understand this before you use R&R, and more importantly, before you _need_ to use it.
The first thing any IBM/Lenovo user should do after setting up their system is to run both ThinkVantage System Update 3, and Windows update. Do the required reboots etc. then, run Rescue & Recovery and make a backup. Then, do another one to an external drive. It’s up to you if you want to include your applications in this initial backup or do another backup after you install them.
Now run regular R&R backups, or let it run on a schedule (it has that feature, to run automatically)
If you ever have a system problem, you’ll be covered and able to recover from most any situation.
Tachyon
November 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm |
Oh yeah, and absolutely make sure you run the utility to make recovery disks in case your hard drive or recovery partition are hosed too!