How to recreate HPA?

How can I recreate the HPA (hidden partition area) on my R40?

 

Hi Cat,
Did you delete it or do you need to back it up?
If your R40 is less than 30 days old, you can call IBM and they will send you the CDs for free. If it's over 30 days old they will charge you for the discs.

Jack

 

Hi Jack,

first of all do not wonder about my english, I am from Germany. ;-)

Well, yes, unfortunately I deleted the HPA, not knowing how difficult it would be to recreate it. I thought using the recovery CDs I got from IBM would be sufficient to get HPA back but it does not work. I can install the OS with this CDs but still do not have HPA.
So when I start my notebook and interrupt booting by pressing the "access IBM" button I cannot use the recovery function because this HPA does not exist any more. :-(

 

Hi Cet,
If you have the recovery CDs, then you have the files needed to recreate the HPA. You are right it is much easier to get rid of the HPA than to create it. I was going to delete mine as well, but I was not going to do it before I could back it up and know I could restore it if I needed to. After learning what all was involved I decided I would leave it in as it only used a few GB of space. I did order the free CDs cause I thought I would be forced to recreate the HPA when my hard drive crashes, and working in the hard drive industry I know a hard drives crash at sometime. Anyway, here is a link to IBMs site with all the info you should need about the HPA and how to recreate it.
http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-46023
good luck
Jack

 

Thank you for the link, Jack, but as much as I understood they are talking about making an image of a harddrive using for example Phoenix ImageCast or PowerQuest DriveImage. But in my case it is too late to do so because my HPA is already gone...
Why is there no image on the recovery CDs they send us?

 

OK, I think I got it! I had not only to erase all datas, but even the partition! What I did is: I formatted the hard drive but that was unnecessary and because of the partition I could not recreate the HPA!
OK, now lets see if it works, the recovery CDs are just running.

 

YES! Thanks god, HPA is here again!

 

Hey...

COuld you help me assess with a little bit similar prob here in my R40e..i think i still have my HPA intact, since i can still see my "Predesktiop GUI".. But when i click "Restore factory..." to reinstall my XP, my DOS halt at this windows:

FWMount BIOS drive 80h (ATA drive 0)
PSA index#.............7
PSA ID#.................888h
Starting Sector........32868981
Sector Count...........5941248
Drive Letter.............

Is my HPA corrupted?? I set it to secutrity "Normal"...can it be modified?
I just dualed boot linux..causing this pain to me...pls help...


dexter

 

Someone upthread mentioned getting discs from IBM. What exactly do they send you? Windows setup disc?

 

You should be able to create the recovery discs which will restore the partition. Start>All Programs>Access IBM>Create Recovery Disks. Provided you didn't already wipe the partition/

 

There is no more start-->Programs-->Create...or etc..because my Thinkpad has no more XP installed in it. It is now like a frozen desert...So immediately, i installed FC4 into it. By "recover..", i mean, to re-install the XP from the hidden-partition-area..not that rapid-recovery stuff, if that's what you thought.

I am anxious to erase my HPA using IBM Tool-->aipass.exe, beacuse i think it is still intact and i have hope that it can stil be recovered. But if somebody can tell me that my HPA is corrupted, based on my above error msgs, then i will erase this HPA to reuse this extra space..

If there's somebody out there, who works with IBM's Hidden-Partition-Area Technology, pls help me diagnose if the above error msgs meant my HPA is indeed corrupted..