Ordering Recovery CDs

2005-03-01T14:12:05Z

Watt: /* Country overview */

Information on getting Recovery CDs from IBM.

The information on this page is unofficial. It is gathered from personal experiences. It is here to raise your chances of success when you give it a try yourself.

==About Recovery CDs==
Recovery CDs enable you to reproduce the original software state on your ThinkPad. Until the beginning of 2001 IBM delivered recovery CDs with the ThinkPads, but starting with the A30/T23/X22 models ThinkPads have a [[PreDesktop Area]], which's purpose is to make Recovery CDs obsolete. There are, however, reasons why you might still want to have them, and for the time being they are available on request.

Recovery CDs are localized, meaning that there are specific versions for each language. The language you will get depends on the language of the OS that was shipped with your ThinkPad. There's usually no way to get CDs in a different language from IBM.

==How to get them==
The normal procedure is to contact the IBM service and ask for them. This can be done by eMail or phone.

If you actually get them or not, seems to be more a personal decision of the service person dealing with you than following fixed rules. Also it seems to depend on your country (see below).

They will usually expect you to tell them a good reason for your request (see below).
As with every service request, you'll also have to provide your model and serial number to verify the warranty state. You can be almost certain not to get the CDs after your warranty has expired. The model number is also used to determine which CDs you will get.

Also, orders done during the first month after purchase have proven to be the most successful.

Or if you haven't already junked Windows and the predesktop partition it is possible to burn off a set of recovery CD's. This totals a 6 CD set and takes a while, but means you have them on hand later if needed.

==Good reasons to tell==
*You replaced your hard drive.
*You installed Linux or some other OS and accidentally removed/destroyed the [[PreDesktop Area]].

==What happens then==
Once it's decided that you get the CDs, they usually get shipped very fast. Times from 16h to 3 days have been reported, 3 days being the time to expect. The shipping can even happen without prior confirmation of your request, so don't be worried if you hear nothing within this time.

==Country overview==
Please put an entry for your country into this table if it's missing and you made a try to get the Recovery CDs.
{| border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"
|-
! style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#cfefcf;" | CDs recieved in
! style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#ffcfbc;" | CDs were denied in
|-
| style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#e9f9e9;" |
*Austria
*Canada
*Finland
*Germany
*Italy
*The Netherlands
*Philippines
*Spain
*Switzerland
*UK
*USA
*Argentina
*France
| style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#fff0e0;" |
*Israel but received after calling IBM Europe
*Australia, payment was requested
|}

[[Category:A30]] [[Category:A30p]] [[Category:A31]] [[Category:A31p]] [[Category:G40]] [[Category:G41]] [[Category:R30]] [[Category:R31]] [[Category:R32]][[Category:R40]] [[Category:R50]] [[Category:R50p]] [[Category:R51]] [[Category:T23]] [[Category:T30]] [[Category:T40]] [[Category:T40p]] [[Category:T41]] [[Category:T41p]] [[Category:T42]] [[Category:T42p]] [[Category:X22]] [[Category:X23]] [[Category:X24]] [[Category:X30]] [[Category:X31]] [[Category:X40]]

Problem with high power drain in ACPI sleep

2005-02-28T22:21:27Z

Watt: /* Affected Models */

Information about the problem of too high power drain in ACPI sleep mode.

==Problem description==
Several people realised that their ThinkPads eat up too much power while suspended to ram via ACPI. Compared to APM suspend to ram the power drain is experienced to be about 10 times as high, 2-5 Watts. This empties the battery within one or two days.

==Affected Models==
*Different symptoms have been reported for different models. In some models the origin of the power drain is obvious ([[Problem with LCD backlight remaining on during ACPI sleep|backlight on during suspend]]), in other models there is no obvious reason.
*On some models/configurations the higher power drain couldn't even be realized or was at least significantly lower.
*The T4x thinkpad series (T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p) suspends to ram just fine, and there are no components that are obviously left powered up. The ultrabay and network light is on, but that is the same under windows (but under APM sleep to RAM those lights are OFF).
The following table gives an overview of the models suffering from the mysterious power drain. To find out about your model, you may use the following [[ACPI sleep power drain test script | script]]. It creates a file <tt>/var/log/battery.log</tt> which will tell you if you are affected or not.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that some models only suffer this problem with certain software. For example, my T40 (2374-94U) has the high power drain issue with the stock Fedora Core 3. If I use one of the more recent kernels from [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~vbraun/computing/T41/kernel.html Volker Braun's T-41 site], everything (suspend-to-RAM, suspend-to-disk) works just fine and my battery life seems much better than APM. In other words, just because you see this problem with your ThinkPad with your current software does not mean that your ThinkPad will doomed to always be affected. There are similar solutions for Debian-based systems too.

{| border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"
|-
! style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#ffcfbc;" | affected models
! style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#cfefcf;" | unaffected models
|-
| style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#fff0e0;" |
*[[:Category:T40 | T40]]
**2373-MU3
**2373-82U
**2373-92U
**2373-22G
*[[:Category:T40p | T40p]]
**2373-G1U
**2373-G3U
**2373-G3G
**2373-G1G
* [[:Category:T41 | T41]]
**2379-DJU
**2373-9HU
**2373-4FG
**2373-2FG
**2373-6U4
**2373-7JU
* [[:Category:T41p | T41p]]
**2373-9FU
* [[:Category:T42 | T42]]
**2378-DUU
**2373-FWG
* [[:Category:R40 | R40]]
** 2722-5MG
** 2722-B3G
* [[:Category:X21 | X21]]
* [[:Category:T30 | T30]]
** 2366-81A
* [[:Category:R51 | R51]]
** 1829-EHG
** 1836-Q6U
| style="vertical-align:top;background-color:#e9f9e9;" |
*[[:Category:T41p | T41p]]
**2373-GKG
**2373-GGG
**[[2373-GHG]]
*[[:Category:T42p | T42p]]
**[[2373-HTG]]
**[[2373-W6M]]
**[[2373-GTG]]
**[[2373-GXG]]
**2373-KXM
*[[:Category:R50p | R50p]]
|}

==Affected Operating Systems==

*Linux, all flavours.
*Windows, for some models as well (only when using non-IBM drivers).

==Status==
The cause of the problem is not really clear, yet.

A faulty DSDT might be responsible for the phenomena. The thinkpad T4x DSDT has a few small bugs, none of which should cause the extra power drain. (Interesting to note: The DSDT from BIOS 3.13 (Nov 04) for the T42p compiles without bugs.)

There is a interesting discussion taking place in the [http://bugme.osdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3022 OSDL Bugzilla].

Update: it seems that the most significant difference can be made by properly turning off the video chip.

==Solutions==
===For Thinkpads with Radeon graphic driver===
A proposed solution is to remove the CONFIG_PPC_PMAC condition for enabling D2 sleep in drivers/video/aty/radeon_pm.c as discussed in [http://bugme.osdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3022 kernel bug 3022]. There you can also find patches doing this. The patches devide in unconditional ones like [http://carrot.hep.upenn.edu/~vbraun/kernel-T4x/test/patch-2.6.11-rc2-radeonfb-D2.patch.bz2 this one for 2.6.11-rc2] and conditional ones. The conditional ones only do D2 on models where it has been reported to work, the unconditional ones force D2 sleep on every model and you might experience hangs on resume with those.

For [[:Category:Fedora Core | Fedora Core]] there's are precompiled patched kernels (2.6.11-rc2 based) available:
*[http://carrot.hep.upenn.edu/~vbraun/kernel-T4x/test/kernel-DANGEROUS-T4x-2.6.11-8.i386.rpm kernel with unconditional patch applied]
*[http://carrot.hep.upenn.edu/~vbraun/kernel-T4x/test/kernel-T4x-2.6.11-8.i386.rpm kernel with conditional patch applied].

If you try, please send the result (hang yes/no, battery drain yes/no) with the precise model number (for example, I have a IBM thinkpad T41 2379-DJU) to <tt>vbraun at physics dot upenn dot edu</tt>, it would be nice if your subject line would include "RADEONFB:" to make sure that I do not miss any emails.

'''ATTENTION!'''<br />
This solution enables doing suspend-to-D2 on non-PPC-machines, which is not tested at all and supposed to be the wrong thing to do!
Be careful and have a look at [http://bugme.osdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3022 the bugs discussion] before applying the patch.

===Other models===
Nothing yet.

[[Category:R40]] [[Category:R50]] [[Category:R50p]] [[Category:R51]] [[Category:R51p]] [[Category:T30]] [[Category:T40]] [[Category:T40p]] [[Category:T41]] [[Category:T41p]] [[Category:T42]] [[Category:T42p]] [[Category:X30]] [[Category:X31]] [[Category:X40]]

ThinkWiki - User contributions [en]

Ordering Recovery CDs

Problem with high power drain in ACPI sleep