Deletion of Hidden/Protected Recovery Partition

[Lemmuel]

Hello everyone. I thought I'd detail one way to remove the preinstalled recovery partition. There are quite a few posts on this but I couldn't find anything in great detail. This is how I did it in the context of a Vista clean install.

DELETION OF PROTECTED PARTITION USING A WINDOWS COMMAND-LINE UTILITY

Background: Lenovo ships current ThinkPads with a preinstalled protected partition on the hard drive. This partition contains a complete backup of the original files and programs. Lenovo isn't currently shipping this recovery data on optical media (DVD/CD) unless the customer calls and asks for it. On my T60p this took up 6,466 MB. Although sometimes this protected area is referred to as hidden, it is readily visible in either XP or Vista. This doesn't really take up all that much space, and for many it could prove to be useful, but for me I wanted that real estate back! Please don't try this unless your confident you won't need your recovery partition.

Viewing the protected recovery partiton:
XP : Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer management > Disk Management
Vista : Start > Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Create and format hard disk partitions

At this point you are in the Disk Management utility and should have a graphical view of your hard drive. You will note that the first partition is ~ 6 GB and in a FAT file system with EISA configuration. The other, larger partition is in the NTFS file system. Note that you cannot change the smaller partition in any way (try right-clicking on it). This is the protected recovery partition.

Changing BIOS Security Settings :
Lenovo has this recovery partition protected in the BIOS under Security. It is referred to as the Predesktop Area. It will help to be sure that this protection is disabled. To do this you will need to enter the BIOS Setup Utility. One way is to restart your ThinkPad and quickly press the F1 key at the ThinkVantage screen. Be ready as this comes quickly. Once in the utility, navigate to Security > Predesktop Area. Disable the setting and Save and Exit.

Deleting the partition :
There are a lot of ways to do this including third-party software with easy-to-understand graphical interfaces. There is a utility built into both Windows XP and Vista which will also work. This is the command-line utility Diskpart. You will have to open a command prompt window to access Diskpart. This can be done using the Run command and then entering cmd or just finding the Command Prompt under accessories. I used the command prompt that is accessible during the Vista install by choosing the "Repair your computer" option > Next > System Recovery Options > Command Prompt. You should read up on Diskpart in the above link to understand the syntax but it is really quite straightforward. Here is the sequence I did to delete the protected recovery partition :

>diskpart
>select disk = 0
>list partition
>select partition = 1
>delete partition override

You may get a warning about deleting the partition so be sure you picked the right one!

The aftermath :
After this you should be able to see the protected partition now under Disk Management as Unallocated. You can now do with it as you please. Remember : This may be best attempted on a new or clean install, when you really have nothing to lose! This can be screwed up and you might not be able to boot up, so proceed with caution. In my case, after I did this in the middle of a clean Vista install, the partitions now showed as 6.4 GB Unallocated and 86 GB NTFS Healthy. Using the install options to format or delete partitions I deleted the 86 GB Healthy partition. This then became 93 GB Uallocated and I simply formatted and now had a single clean partition.

Good Luck! Lem