OMG, please help me!

if you have another machine

pull the hd out of your ibm
and put it either in a tower or an external enclosure
use a program like getdataback to scan the hd and then get back what you can (if that matters to you)

otherwise, use the windows xp / or restore cd to make your machine like you just bought it

Go to Best Buy.
Purchase a ghosting program like Acronis or Norton Ghost 9.
Ghost (i.e. make an image) of the working R50e laptops drive.
Save the image on an external HD or burn it to disk (from the sounds of it, it'll probably be more like 6~7 disks).
Then re-ghost the malfunctioning r50e'd drive with the image you just made and burned to disk(s).

Good luck.

You should have deleted all of the existing partitions on the HDD first, and then created your own partition(s).

Well, first, you can thank IBM for screwing you over with useless "recovery" discs (yes, believe it or not, this is normal).

IBM puts a recovery partition on the hard drive that should still be there. Try pressing the blue "Access IBM" on boot-up. This should invoke a recovery process.

Or, if you want to do it the right way and don't mind spending a few bucks:
- Unhide the recovery partition through the BIOS
- Go buy a real copy of XP
- When installing XP, wipe the drive and recreate whatever partitions you want

"4.(iv) I've formatted and upon boot there is now two Windows options showing, what do I do?

This is actually quite common, and first thing is first I want to assure you that the original install that you formatted is actually gone, that partition is erased and there is no reason to start over with another format yet again. This happens as a result of a 'leftover' sometimes present in the boot.ini file of windows after a fresh install. You will find that if you try and select both, one will actually load your new windows and the other will present an error (becuase it is a leftover that leads to nothing). Therefore it is safe to remove this leftover reference so that it no longer appears at boot and you load straight into Windows.

To eliminate this load screen there are two options, the easy and 'forget about it' option is to simply disable the load screen. To do this:

(i) Right click on My Computer on the desktop and select Properties;
(ii) Go to the Advanced tab and click Settings under the 'Startup and Recovery' box;
(iii) Untick the box that says 'Time to display list of Operating Systems'. Hey presto, the problem is gone .

Alternatively, we can go a little further and edit the boot.ini file, which removes the invalid Windows entry. First thing is first, boot up the laptop and find out which reference works and which doesn't, usually the bottom one is false. With this information we now get into it. Once on the Windows desktop:

(i) Right click on My Computer on the desktop and select Properties;
(ii) Go to the Advanced tab and click Settings under the 'Startup and Recovery' box;
(iii) Click the Edit button seen in the 'System startup' box, you will be presented with a notepad entry such as the following



Note that it may vary from this slightly, depending upon what two OS you had installed, etc.
(iv) Delete the entire line of the appropriate OS you want to remove from the boot list. For example above I have bolded the second whole entry as false above, when the bottom selection was false. Delete the top line if the opposite is true;
(v) You are done, Save the changes and exit all of this. Upon next boot you will go straight into your new Windows install, enjoy!"

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