IBM/Lenovo Service Partition Help

[JMEaT]

All IBM Desktops and Laptops come with a recovery partition called Rescue and Recovery. We are ordering R61 laptops in bulk and they come preloaded with Vista Business (Service Partition and all)

We are an institution of higher education and have a VLK version of Windows XP for these laptops. They don't want to go Vista until end of 08. I can get XP installed on them and the Vista Service partition even works.

Here is my problem. Using Ghost 8.0 to do a disk grab of the hard drive (Both partitions) and XP still works when applied to another machine however the service partition takes a dump and no longer works. I just get scrambled characters when hitting F11 (Service Partition launch from BIOS).

Is anyone familiar with this scenario? We need the Vista service partition because when the student graduates and takes the laptop with them the laptop is reset back to factory spec (Vista), thereby erasing any VLK software.

[fliptw]

are you restoring the dump to another machine, or the original?

You might want to try with dd.

Personally, I would've ordered the machines with no OS on them, licensing issues and such, but there you are.

[CDN_Merlin]

If you load one of them up, I'm sure you can create a restore CD or DVD for that purpose. Our HP's we order have that option. You can even contact IBM and they should be able to send you the DVD.

[JMEaT]

I checked with our Vendor and this is legal I'm told.

[CDN_Merlin]

I checked with our Vendor and this is legal I'm told.

yeah it's legal but it'd be easier to make a DVD of the restore CD that is included on the system when you buy it.

[JMEaT]

I checked with our Vendor and this is legal I'm told.

yeah it's legal but it'd be easier to make a DVD of the restore CD that is included on the system when you buy it.

That's another problem, IBM software won't create a Bootable CD... I'm told its been ordered from IBM...

Sigh.

[CDN_Merlin]

At least you can get one.