I have a 3 year old Thinkpad. I do backups to an external HDD every once in a while, but I was curious what would happen with a catastrophic disk failure where I couldn't get into the recover console. I have a "Rescue and recovery" disk that I burned, and I know it boots, but the only way to really test it is a destructive install.
I bought a replacement (bigger and faster) HDD from geeks.com; it was so cheap I couldn't afford not to buy it. It got here today, and so I swapped it out with the old drive and booted from the recovery CD. It asked what I wanted, and I told it to restore the system. Hilarity ensued.
First I tried a restore back to a factory preinstall. The plan was to install back to ground zero, then use Windows Backup to restore the system from my most recent backup on the external drive. It started whirring and clicking and writing; everything going good... then it said to insert CD #2. There is no #2. There never was an option to create disk 2. So I aborted out of that and told it to restore from a previous backup. It can't find any previous backups. Apparently IBM or Lenovo used their own proprietary backup format and they don't recognize Microsoft's backup files. If this had been an actual emergency, I would have had to take the external drive to Best Buy's geek squad, or the local computer repair shop, and paid them big bucks to maybe restore the backup.
I swapped back the old drive and I'm running the ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery backup. It will be interesting to see what it generates. It's been running for a half an hour. Says it has 148 minutes left to go.