Ordering Recovery CDs

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.

Orders placed during the first month after purchase have proven to be the most successful. Note that you will need to pay a $45.00 fee for the CDs regardless of when you order them.

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.

Question: Can someone describe in detail how to burn the 6 CD recovery set from the PreDesktop Area? Thanks.

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.

CDs received in	CDs were denied in
Argentina Austria Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Italy The Netherlands Norway Philippines Spain Switzerland UK USA Turkey	Israel but received after calling IBM Europe Australia, payment was requested India, just a plain "not possible"