Ghosting Thinkpad T40
Updated: 21 May 2010 | 4 comments
We are a school and received 40 thinkpad laptops (T40) from a local company.
We set up one of the laptops to the specs we needed and made a ghost of it. (XP3)
we ghosted another hard drive and when we put it back in the laptop it won't boot.
It simply sits there and the curser flashes.
We do this all the time will our donated Dells- but the IBM thinkpad just won't work.
We looked online and found out we should use the following to make the ghost -
The command line syntax is, C:\> GHOST -IB - but it still didn't work.
Can anyone help me make a working ghost to get these nice laptops out to teachers?
WE know the ghost file is good, we can see it.
thanks,
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Recovery partition
Did you create a totally new XP3 install on your T40 machines or use an existing image supplied with the laptops?
The way that Lenovo ship these machines includes a recovery partition and may also include a hidden partition on the hard disk. If you have cloned an existing build and then deployed it to a machine where the hard disk has been totally wiped, the partition numbering may no longer be compatible with your original machine within the boot.ini file (hidden and read only in the root of C:\ )
Do these machines ship with IDE or SATA hard disks, and how are you creating the ghost image?
How big is the ghost image, and how are you transferring it from one machine to another?
How do you actually know that the Ghost image is good, if you are unable to build a working machine with it?
If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.
We installed a new version of
We installed a new version of XP.
We did not touch the recovery partition, we only deleted the partition with XP and then reinstalled it.
We did not wipe the HD to be cloned. so partitions should be OK.
By searching on line it seems the MBR is different on IBM's and ghost doesn't recognize them as needed.
The are not SATA hard disks. We don't know how to get all the boot info so the laptop will boot.....
MBR is different
Because of the system recovery utility that IBM ship with their builds, you may have to ensure that your MBR is compatible.
From what I recall, to enable system recovery to work, our IBM machine hard disks were formatted, then the bootsector was written using
bootsect.exe /nt52 C: then the boot manager aspect was handled by running bmgr32.exe /THINK /IBM /M1 /f bootmgr.bin
Frankly it was a royal pain in the rear.
What I suspect you will end up having to do, is to wipe the hard disks completely, removing all partitions, then recreate a clean partition, make a build on it without the rescue and recovery stuff, and then use that for your deployments, cleaning and reformatting each hard disk as you go.
If your issue has been solved, please use the "Mark as Solution" link on the most relevant thread.
I experienced the same issue
I experienced the same issue on a lenovo ThinkCentre M57p (9967). Image created without incident, even Ghosted some 60 PCs. But when a HD failed, and the image tried to be applied to a different manufacturers HD, it failed to the "blinking" cursor.
My problem was with the HD, a Samsung 160 GB SATA II drive that was being used for the initial image. There were firmware updates and even some replacements for the drives, but that did not fix the issue.
I ended up using a WesternDigital 80 GB SATA I drive to create my image, and deploy to the existing 160 GB drives, the issue disappeared altogether.
Try using a different manufacturers' drive (smaller) in the T40 and reimage (Test first on the initial build, less space...).
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