Thinkpads Forum

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?

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.

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

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)

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.

Paul Pavlik wrote: 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.

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.....