Thinkpads Forum

I was wondering if I use the recovery disks to reset to factory if it repartitions the drives as well. I'm guessing it does, but I thought I'd ask first.

THanks, Mark

They reset the machine to factory, as you received it - no more extra partitions.

Actually they will delete all partitions on any hard drive you have installed has been my experience, and create a hidden service partition (about 5 GB), and the rest of the available space on the drive becomes the primary partition. It Doesn't matter if you have a 60 GB drive installed or a 250 GB drive installed.

DAH is right. The discs will delete all partitions and install the hidden recovery partition and an empty main partition. Then it will reboot and restore the main partition from the hidden restore partition.
If you want to retain your custom partitioning you can restore windows using the F11 button at boot-up. This will restore your windows partition and leave everything else alone.

carbon_unit wrote:DAH is right. The discs will delete all partitions and install the hidden recovery partition and an empty main partition. Then it will reboot and restore the main partition from the hidden restore partition.
If you want to retain your custom partitioning you can restore windows using the F11 button at boot-up. This will restore your windows partition and leave everything else alone.

I hate to be a pain in the [censored], but technically I believe the above is wrong. Yes the recovery program will delete all partitions, and it creates a service partition, and a main partition, but I believe it copies all files to the main partition. Then it recreates the OS on that partition, and sets up the OS and any additional programs, as a last step it actually creates the programs in the service partition, and modifies the service partition and moves it to it's final location.

msteudel wrote:I was wondering if I use the recovery disks to reset to factory if it repartitions the drives as well. I'm guessing it does, but I thought I'd ask first.

THanks, Mark

If you are running more than one OS and if the other(s) happen to be OS/2 and/or eCS, you can zip up all your partitions other than windows and save your partition information with DFSee. After the recovery, you'll have to shrink the windows and re-partition the drive. You can then unzip the contents of your other partitions and you're back in business. Unlike windows, OS/2 and eCS do not use anything which is dependent on position within the drive.

You do, however, have to make sure that you use a zipper which can, with appropriate command line options, preserve EAs and empty directories.

Ted