How do I Reimage a SafeGuard Easy laptop?

Hi F,

2 things. First make sure your install disk can see the drive i.e. has the appropriate HD controller driver and second, the SGN partition will be encrypted and unrecognised. If you go to advanced settings in the initial screen you can delete non-dos partition and then install in unallocated space which will create the 2 basic win 7 (assuming that's what's going back on it) partitions for you....

Matt

Thanks for the reply Matt...

It's an old Lenovo T60 (32 bit). I only have Win 7 x64 install CDs. I'm attempting to install XP Pro and the install disk doesn't see any disk, even when I put a good work.

I'm not sure what "advanced settings" screen you're referring to. I can get to the SGE login screen, but I don't have a username / pw to get past it. With the Windows install, I don't get far enough to see the advanced settings screen...

When I mount the laptop disk as a secondary drive in another Win 7 desktop PC it shows in "Disk Management" as "Uninitialized". A dialog appears automatically asking to initialize it w/ a MBR. When I click to proceed a dialog pops up reporting "Virtual Disk Manager" "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

From the Event Viewer:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Virtual Disk Service
Date:          9/10/2012 11:28:11 AM
Event ID:      10
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      TheXXXXXXXXX3
Description:
VDS fails to write boot code on a disk during clean operation. Error code: 8007045D@02070008
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="Virtual Disk Service" />
    <EventID Qualifiers="49664">10</EventID>
    <Level>2</Level>
    <Task>0</Task>
    <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-09-10T15:28:11.000000000Z" />
    <EventRecordID>14413</EventRecordID>
    <Channel>System</Channel>
    <Computer>TheGarbers3</Computer>
    <Security />
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data>8007045D@02070008</Data>
  </EventData>
</Event>

and I can't do anything with it.  :-(

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

F

Hi,

you need to reset the MBR from the protected drive first.

This can be done by using the Windows OS install CD / DVD and run the command "fdsik /mbr" or "FIXMBR" e.g. by using BootRec.exe /FIXMBR".

After that I would expect that Windows can recognize the drive again and you would be able to setup you new partition setup as well. 

Note:

You won't be able to read any data from the old / original implementation after running the above describt command. 

Best regards
Rainer 

Ah, see the problem here. The issue is that the XP installation CD doesn't support the hard drive controller - quite a common problem with this earlier OS. If you watch the boot sequence on the CD, you'll see it prompt you 'Press F6 for additional drivers' - This prompt allows you to add drivers during the installation process to the initial boot loader so that e.g. it can see the controller and then the drives attached to it. Now, it gets tricky here. F6 on the XP installation disk requires drivers to be stored on a floppy drive and there's not many floppy drives on laptops (or anything else) these days. So, the easiest method is to take your XP installation disk and use a tool called nLite to integrate the appropriate driver into it and burn a new CD with the new drivers that you can then boot and install from.

The T60 laptop I believe came with an intel ICH6 controler (Intel Matrix Storage Controller 82801Gx) which wasn't part of the original XP install. You can download the relevant driver to integrate with nLite from Lenovo's website under the 'storage' section and because it tends to be left out, it's under the windows 2000 section too.

I think some later XP installation disks which had SP3 integrated had this controller already so should work. Once you can see the disk, you can remove the encrypted partition (seen as 'non-dos partition') easily - you'll see this at the start of the setup and then install XP into the freshly unpartitioned space.

PM me if you get stuck, I should be able to assist.

Matt

The FixMBR utility requires that I know the admin password on the target drive. I don't have it any longer, that's one of the reasons I'm trying to wipe the disk and do a fresh install...

Thanks; and any other suggestions are welcome.

Have you tried to slave the drive on a PC and reformat it when prompted?