How to do a factory restore?

[quink]

What is the 'best' method for doing a factory restore? From the CD's created when the system is up and running or from the 'thinkvantage' button?
Does either method compeletely wipe the harddrive and install windows and rescue and recovery partition again or does just windows get installed?
Thanks for the help

[jvarszegi]

I can only tell you what I did. I rebooted and hit the ThinkVantage button at the startup screen. It's very easy. It took about half an hour to finish with everything, and rebooted probably four or five times during the process.

[quink]

Ah. Sounds good. I'll test both methods out. Leaving the country for a month in a couple of weeks and i'm still learning this system. So i wanted to test the recovery procedure in case something goes horribly wrong. Also have a problem or two that i'd like to fix by restoring it. When going into the rescue and recovery boot up instead of windows it gives me an error about not being able to mount my private disk(i had one but removed it) and was hoping it'd fix things like that.

[GomJabbar]

The "preferred method" is to boot into Rescue and Recovery by pressing the ThinkVantage button at the beginning of the boot sequence. If your hard drive is in good shape, there is less chance of a problem (from reading a damaged CD or DVD).

The other method is to boot up off of the Product Recovery Startup Disc, then when prompted insert the remaining CD's or DVD.

In both cases you enter the Rescue and Recovery workspace, then you choose to restore factory contents. When I did it last, there was about half a dozen reboots to complete the process.

[quink]

So both methods do the exact same thing?
I just did the ThinkVantage button method and it worked wonderfully. Testing the cd's just to see how those work and to compare the differences. Either way seems like they tested this out fairly well. I've setup a lot of systems from scratch and have struggled to find a good backup/restore solution and this one seems to be great.

[GomJabbar]

So both methods do the exact same thing?

Generally yes. However I read that if you restore factory contents from the hard drive, you only erase and restore the C: partition. If you restore with the CD/DVD's, then all the partitions of the hard drive are erased, and your hard drive is restored to the original factory condition. So restoring from a hard drive would leave a D: partition intact, whereas restoring from CD/DVD's would not. Note that I have used the Product Recovery CD/DVD's, but I have not tried the restore from the hard drive.

Restore factory contents: This recovery method reformats the primary partition of your hard disk (drive C); then, reinstalls your operating system, device drivers, and factory-installed software. The hard disk is restored to the same state as when the computer was originally manufactured. For instructions on restoring the factory contents, see Using the Restore factory contents method.

The above is referring to restoring from the hard drive.

When you use the Product Recovery CDs, all data and partitions on your hard disk are deleted. The end result will be a single C: partition containing the original factory contents.

The above is referring to restoring from CD/DVD's

[quink]

I tried both methods just for fun and the end result, to the user, is exactly the same.
When I used the ThinkVantage button and as my first method, it fixed up the problem I had even in the rescue and recovery area.

Using the ThinkVantage button was significantly faster and easier. Either option is recommended