An Unintentional look at IBM's Rescue and Recovery Software

September 20, 2005 Vince Anido

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.

[GN1]

- After saving my files, I called IBM tech support to see if I had any recourse to recover the system as it was. My first call was routed to Atlanta, GA, and the tech quickly told me that they don't support recovery of non-booting registry errors, and that I had to reinstall from scratch. Frustrated, I searched the Microsoft support site, and found a way to recover (link), but the method warned that it might break the ability to login to the recovery console, and it needed a windows install disc (which doesn't exist for TPC users…grrr). After learning this, I called tech support again, and got a much more helpful tech who was also in Atlanta. He tried to walk me through a couple of other options, but in the end we concluded that without a bootable windows installation, I had no way to restore a registry created by the System Restore subsystem of Windows XP. (Note: I have since started researching bootable USB options, and will hopefully find a solution for TPC users soon.)

After triggering the 'restore to factory contents' option of the recover menu [GN2]

- If I had made a backup image, the program also gives you the options of restoring completely from a backup image (windows, programs, and documents - I believe it would format the HD, so you still would have to rescue your documents as I did) OR you can attempt to restore your operating system only (which would presumably leave your documents intact). I would of course used this option if I had made a backup. I also considered trying these options before I wrote this article, but I can only spend so much time without the system - it is my primary computing device and I can only tolerate so much downtime. :)

the system went on autopilot for about half an hour, working hard and rebooting about 10-20 times. [GN3]

- Unfortunately I wasn't able to really study this portion of the recovery because I was at work, and had other duties to attend to. At a glance, the system seemed to access a separate hidden partition of the hard drive and reinstall windows from there, running a system configuration script probably written by Lenovo to setup the system automatically.

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.

[GN4-More RnR options]

- In addition to the RnR functions I used in my recovery, the system provided a couple of other notable features. The one that stuck me as extremely useful, was a web browser and internet connectivity. While the wireless adapter was unavailable, I was able to plug in the Ethernet port and get full internet access. This would have been very helpful for Eric Mack when an errant uninstaller deleted a critical DLL on his system, and would allow you to easily google your way to a fixed system. The ethernet connectivity also allows you to map a network drive to access files from. So you could easily copy files around using that.

The help system was helpful, which I realize is a strange thing to point out, but it is nice to have a useful help document if you're on the road, away from your manuals (though IBM didn't provide paper manuals with this tablet anyways - all the docs are electronic, which is a separate gripe I share with Nicole Simon).

The last item I found very interesting, was the option to boot from an external device, which allows you to use any device attached to the system as a bootable one. Presumably, one could use this to force a boot into a linux variant off a CD to do some troubleshooting. Alternatively, you could use it to boot from a Windows PE image created with Bart PE. This opens up a few options for us lowly Tablet PC users who have no way of getting a traditional install disk to get to the windows recovery console.

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.