The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    HPA restoration

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by kanouti, Dec 3, 2007.

  1. kanouti

    kanouti Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    1
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi all.

    I have two R50 ThinkPads that no longer respond to the "Access IBM" button or the "Enter" key during startup.

    When pressed, one of the ThinkPads displays a "Startup Interrupt Menu" that lists three options - F1 to enter BIOS, F12 to show boot list and Enter to pause. The other just does nothing. The first has had it's hard drive replaced, so it never had the HPA on it, the other had the HPA destroyed. Both machines have the Pre-Desktop option in the BIOS set to normal.

    The bit that I get stuck on is, regardless of whether I use the Product Recovery discs to restore the ThinkPad back to its Factory Defaults, I cannot seem to be able to get the HPA back or boot into the Pre-Desktop Area. I have tried all sorts of things, including changing BIOS settings and using Secure Data Disposal (SDD) to completely clean the disk of data, but I can't seem to get it to work.

    Are there steps that I have missed? Have others had success? Have others had the same problem?
     
  2. matthewjheaney

    matthewjheaney Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    1
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5