Killed my wife's laptop!

[Spoiler]

Being helpful has bought me pain today! Last night windows updated installed the latest security patches on my laptop (Windows 7). It had to do the usual reboot thing. So, this morning I thought I would let my wife's Lenovo laptop run through the updates first thing, and save it doing it later on when she was using it. Big mistake - laptop reboots and immediately blue screens, some verification of a knowndll failed.

Tried all the usual windows stuff, F8: safe mode, other boot options. Each one blue screens. So, now I've got a laptop that doesn't boot.

Does anyone know how I can go about re-installing the OS. It seems that it didn't come with any install media (Windows 7) and I don't even have a product key for it. I guess I had to do some sort of recovery disk from the other partition that it came with on the hard disk.

It's still under warranty, but t doesn't look like Lenovo support covers software, only hardware, so I'm not sure I'll get much joy with them.

Fortunately I have a backup from last night, so haven't lost any data.

[Spoiler]

Right, had a search and it looks like I should have made a 'rescue & recovery CD' prior to the OS screwing up.

Just taken out the battery pack and found the Windows 7 product key. So just need to get old of a windows 7 pro cd now.

[Clippy]

I believe that Lenovo's have a separate partition where an image of the original build is stored.

To access this image you need to press the Blue (Lenovo?) button at boot up - apologies, can't remember exactly what the button is labelled but it tends to look like a power button on the top right of the keyboard.

[Fred Bloggs]

Your Lenovo maybe different, but on the missus Lenovo machine, as the machine first starts, the Lenovo logo screen appears, look at the bottom left of the screen and for a couple of seconds you have the option to press (I think) the F2 key to boot into the Lenovo recovery system. Her Lenovo also has a second small button next to the on button that does the same thing. I recommend that when you have everything set up again as normal that you periodically run the Lenovo restore utility to take a back up of the system. This way, when you restore, you have a more or less upto date system restored rather than a factory default system that you have to start from scratch with. HTH.

[chef]

think like an IT contractor man !!

buy a new laptop for yourself and donate your laptop to the missus..
spend your work billable time fixing the broken laptop then put it on ebay to recoup some value from your super expensive new one.. problem solved

[Spoiler]

Used the blue thinkvantage button on startup - sometimes I'll get an F11 option to go into the recovery mode, but this just brings up the lenovo recovery splash screen and then boots into windows (at which point the blue screen occurs). Then the next time F11 isn't an option on the menu!

Just about to re-install the OS from a vanilla Windows 7 install dvd . . .

[Fred Bloggs]

That's why you need to burn the recovery DVD whhen you first get the laptop!