Hiding the lenovo recovery partition

[shinigami7th]

I know that my question is the opposite of what people usually ask in this forum..... But, it is true....

It began with my recently purchased lenovo T400 which I bought in my university laptop deals. When I received the set, I found that the seals on the packaging are already broken. But, after I asked the technician, they said that they already opened it to install some university-related software. So far it's ok....

Then I proceed to do overall check on the set.... One thing struck me.... I can see the backup partition! It's really weird... I owned an acer before and i roughly know how the recovery partition should look like. In my computer, there are 3 drives visible:

-Local Disk (C:), 275gb, 20gb used: Primary vista partition, nothing wrong
-Lenovo (D:), 20gb, 4gb used: This one has only 2 folders inside, 'showroom' and 'swtools'
-SERVICEV003 (S:), 3.5gb, 700mb used: This is the weird one. The folders inside indicate this is the recovery partition (there is a folder called 'recovery'.... should be quite obvious)

Then, I tried using the blue button during boot..... I can't get into the emergency backup partition, having an error saying that there are something wrong with the boot sector. I reinstalled R&R, hoping it would recover my mbr... And it works! I can get into the emergency mode n all. However, the recovery partition is still visible under vista.... So, 2 questions:

1. How to hide the recovery partition?
2. Is it possible to reduce the size of the recovery partition?

[carbon_unit]

1. Go into the BIOS and set the recovery partition to "normal"
2. no, if you do windows will start complaining about the partition being low on free space.

[shinigami7th]

thanks, but there is a slight problem tho..... There is no such option in my bios... any ideas?

[carbon_unit]

I guess they must have changed it on the new Txx series. Sorry, I don't know how to do it on one of them yet. Hopefully I will get my hands on a new Txx or Wxx someday soon. (Dreams of a shiny new W400 dance through my head)

[Paul Pavlik]

Go into the BIOS and set the recovery partition to "normal"

I believe this means to set the Security for the Pre-desktop Area to Normal.

[carbon_unit]

I believe this means to set the Security for the Pre-desktop Area to Normal.

You are correct Paul, for an earlier Thinkpad. I really don't know what a T400 has for BIOS settings.
I really shouldn't post when I already late getting out of the door. Sorry guys.

[shinigami7th]

I think the problem lies with my laptop itself... As u can see, I got this T400 earlier than the public market, i.e. this might be a initial, prototype version that is only sold under my university promo. I noticed that the bios settings r very limited and there might be some hardware conflicts.

I did a full restore using R&R yesterday from the recovery partition. The recovery went without errors, but somehow, the vista was missing a lot of system files.... And for some reason, the recovery partition became C: drive and my old C: drive became D: drive. The emergency recovery mode was also inaccessible. This one is very weird....

Then I did a full restore using the backup DVD included in the original package..... It did restore everything to its factory state, but somehow, the graphics card driver (Radeon 3470) was not there... I regained the emergency recovery mode though....

Also, occasionally, if i press the blue ThinkVantage button during startup, they might give an error about Button C1 (forgot the exact wording, i cannot really reproduce the error, it just happens randomly).

I will post my laptop's BIOS options later.....