Thank you for the info. I actually succeded to wipe the whole hard disk with DFT from Hitachi (who apparantly making the IBM hard drives since several years ago). The recovery disks that IBM provided to me helped me then to reinstall both the recovery sector and the actuall XP OS.

Now I am writting to you with a fresh ThinkPad which works very fine.

Cheers,

R Jay

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com