How to edit Recovery disks

[onespeedbiker]

I have a 390e Thinkpad with recovery disks for both Windows 95 and 98. The Win98 disk boots, but the Win95 does not (no big surprise here). However, since the Win 95 recovery disk is an image file, using a standard Win95/DOS boot disk does not initiate the recovery process, as there is no start/install file*. I have have discovered if I boot with the Win98 disk, and at the point the disk starts "recovering from the CD", if I switch CDs, the program will go ahead and install Win95. It got me wondering, what if I edit the Win98 CD and replace the Win98 image files with the Win 95 image files? But here is the rub, both ISOs have a proprietary format, that allows the ISO to be burned to a CD, but the files can not be extracted directly from the ISO. You can copy the files off the resulting CD, but if you edit the files and then burn the edited CD, the Win98 CD will not boot; this doesn't matter with the Win95 CD as it couldn't boot to begin with. So I'm wondering is there any way to edit the Win98 Recovery CD.

* I do have a Thinkpad Win9x install diskette that works with other Thinpads, but for some reason it will not boot on the 390e, leading me to believe the Win95 recovery disk for the 390e came with a proprietary boot/ CD install diskette.

[onespeedbiker]

Well I figured it out; I used UltraISO. The ISO looks similar to that I made with Imgburn, but the Imgburn CD didn't boot. I'll make it available to theterminater9 and the Recovery Set Repository

[stuartmcivor]

This doesn't answer how to edit the recovery discs but is yet another way to get the Windows 95 cd to work.

Start the process (boot) with the bootable Windows 98 cd and during the recovery process switch to the non-bootable Windows 95 cd when reaching the screen that reads...

This CD-ROM contains the preload:

Windows 98, US Preload for ThinkPad 390E:

Press <Enter> to recover from this image
or,
insert the appropriate CD, and then Press <Enter>

After inserting the non-bootable Windows 95 cd the menu changes to show Windows 95, press Enter and after a couple more prompts the recovery process runs to completion without errors. A reboot and Windows 95 loads.

I've tried it multiple times and noticed that if I choose the option Factory Default Partitioning and Format All Drives I have to swap back and forth between the bootable Windows 98 cd and the non-bootable Windows 95 cd. The recovery still completed without errors.

Stuart