Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I have recently acquired a T61 with windows Vista Business on.
There is a big possibility i need to use XP Pro instead for couple of month before reaplying vista.

I have tried to get a clear answer by reading through the forum but yet to find one. I am wondering if I remove the recovery partition when installing XP, will i be able to get it back if i use the recovery DVD i just made? Or the question could be in case i have a new harddisk in the future, will it be possible to reapply the recovery partition on it somehow?

I hope someone have come across this and could shed some light or guidance on this.

...in case i have a new harddisk in the future, will it be possible to reapply the recovery partition on it somehow?

Yes. First partition the new drive as you wish and install on it the operating system(s); then restore the backed-up Recovery partition at the tail end of that drive (i.e., following all the other partitions); and then run the Recovery Repair utility found on the IBM/Lenovo site.

wd40 wrote:Hi,
I have recently acquired a T61 with windows Vista Business on.
There is a big possibility i need to use XP Pro instead for couple of month before reaplying vista.

I have tried to get a clear answer by reading through the forum but yet to find one. I am wondering if I remove the recovery partition when installing XP, will i be able to get it back if i use the recovery DVD i just made? Or the question could be in case i have a new harddisk in the future, will it be possible to reapply the recovery partition on it somehow?

I hope someone have come across this and could shed some light or guidance on this.

Perhaps it is model specific, or even rescue and recover version specific. If you obtain a set of recovery CDs or (DVDs for Vista) from Lenovo my experience is yes. If you use a set that you create yourself you'll be able to get back some but not all, of what you had.

EOMtp wrote:

...in case i have a new harddisk in the future, will it be possible to reapply the recovery partition on it somehow?

Yes. First partition the new drive as you wish and install on it the operating system(s); then restore the backed-up Recovery partition at the tail end of that drive (i.e., following all the other partitions); and then run the Recovery Repair utility found on the IBM/Lenovo site.

***For this to work you'll need to first create a backup of the partition with something like Acronis True Image. If you run Lenovo/IBM R&R it will repartition your disk, and wipe any image on it.

Yes you'll be able to get back the recovery partition from Product Recovery disks, which would wipe out your enire HDD 1st to create it.

You might also consider backing up all the contents of C:\SWTOOLS which contains drivers, fixes, 3rd party utilities etc.

Thank you for the above and excuse me for asking further.

I am also wondering if I get a new harddrive, will i be able to configure it so that it will have the recovery partition on it? and does the drive need to be the same size as my current one i made the R&R cds from? will I have a problem if i get a bigger drive?

by the way, is it normal for the recovery partition to take so much space. my drive is supposed to be 100GB and it shows 86.5 instead.

cheers.

wd40 wrote:snip....I am also wondering if I get a new harddrive, will i be able to configure it so that it will have the recovery partition on it? and does the drive need to be the same size as my current one i made the R&R cds from? will I have a problem if i get a bigger drive?by the way, is it normal for the recovery partition to take so much space. my drive is supposed to be 100GB and it shows 86.5 instead....snip

1. Yes, if you use Product Recovery disks they will automatically lay recovery partition during installation.

2. No.

3. No.

4. Service partition takes around 4-6GB. Also, HDD capacity is always less and differs from the advertised size by a few GB's. This is due to the different measurements (Base 2) used by HDD manufactures (1000 MB per GB). Your computer uses the correct measurement (1024 MB per GB). So for e.g. if you HDD space was advertised as 100GB then actual size will be around 94GB.

For more info. , you might consider reading the following article:

When a Byte is not a Byte.