Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

Just wondering:

Should I leave the factory recovery partition in my new X61T?

How big is it?


I usually like to have my main OS partition be the first partition since that occupies the fastest portion of the HDD. Is the Factory Recovery Partition using up the fastest porton of the haddrive?



Thanks!

I think its around 10Gbs?
I left mine, and am glad I did, I have done a back up from it a couple of times, and need to do another one over the summer.

Trekk69 wrote:I think its around 10Gbs?
I left mine, and am glad I did, I have done a back up from it a couple of times, and need to do another one over the summer.

That's a good point. There's peace of mind in knowing that you can always go right back to the beginning.

However, you could just make a set of recovery DVD's at the beginning and it would do the same thing. 2-4 DVD's should cover it..

don't need to let it on the hard drivve ... but only if you have the recovery DVDs or CDs ! For the Backup I use Acronis Tru Image which is much more flexible, but that's up to everyone !

Anyway I had to resize the main Windows partition with acronis Partition suite (because the schrink function in Vista did not free enough room) and the problem is that after à third party resize, you have to rebuilt the boot sector with a standard Windows Vista DVD. That's not possible with the hidden partition first. Or at least I didn't achieve this.

Resumé : no need to keep it, but need to have the recovery DVDs

chocorem wrote:don't need to let it on the hard drivve ... but only if you have the recovery DVDs or CDs ! For the Backup I use Acronis Tru Image which is much more flexible, but that's up to everyone !

Anyway I had to resize the main Windows partition with acronis Partition suite (because the schrink function in Vista did not free enough room) and the problem is that after à third party resize, you have to rebuilt the boot sector with a standard Windows Vista DVD. That's not possible with the hidden partition first. Or at least I didn't achieve this.

Resumé : no need to keep it, but need to have the recovery DVDs

Yes, that brings into question the next big hurdle in Vista: partitioning. Perhaps I should start another thread on this.

Anyways, I haven't looked into the state of 3rd party partition tools for Vista since Sept 2007, but at that time the best way I found was to use PerfectDisk defragger to move all your partition data to the beginning of the partition, and then the Vista resizer is able to do any size partition.

This doesn't handle getting rid of the factory partition, however. I wish PartitionMagic worked on Vista. Or Acronis' (it sounds like it doesn't from your post, since it doesn't even handle rewriting the MBR correctly!)

Yes that's the point, Acronis works, but when mooving/resizing the system partition, it hangs .... It's not a big problem, you just have to repair the mbr .... but if someone has a better solution ! that would be nice !

snots wrote:

chocorem wrote:don't need to let it on the hard drivve ... but only if you have the recovery DVDs or CDs ! For the Backup I use Acronis Tru Image which is much more flexible, but that's up to everyone !

Anyway I had to resize the main Windows partition with acronis Partition suite (because the schrink function in Vista did not free enough room) and the problem is that after à third party resize, you have to rebuilt the boot sector with a standard Windows Vista DVD. That's not possible with the hidden partition first. Or at least I didn't achieve this.

Resumé : no need to keep it, but need to have the recovery DVDs

Yes, that brings into question the next big hurdle in Vista: partitioning. Perhaps I should start another thread on this.

Anyways, I haven't looked into the state of 3rd party partition tools for Vista since Sept 2007, but at that time the best way I found was to use PerfectDisk defragger to move all your partition data to the beginning of the partition, and then the Vista resizer is able to do any size partition.

This doesn't handle getting rid of the factory partition, however. I wish PartitionMagic worked on Vista. Or Acronis' (it sounds like it doesn't from your post, since it doesn't even handle rewriting the MBR correctly!)

I try to use perfectdisk ... but unable to move boot and metadata files ! So as the file are located in the midle of the disk, impossible to realy shrink the disk !

How did you manage to put ALL the file at the start of the disk !

chocorem wrote:

snots wrote: Yes, that brings into question the next big hurdle in Vista: partitioning. Perhaps I should start another thread on this.

Anyways, I haven't looked into the state of 3rd party partition tools for Vista since Sept 2007, but at that time the best way I found was to use PerfectDisk defragger to move all your partition data to the beginning of the partition, and then the Vista resizer is able to do any size partition.

This doesn't handle getting rid of the factory partition, however. I wish PartitionMagic worked on Vista. Or Acronis' (it sounds like it doesn't from your post, since it doesn't even handle rewriting the MBR correctly!)

I try to use perfectdisk ... but unable to move boot and metadata files ! So as the file are located in the midle of the disk, impossible to realy shrink the disk !

How did you manage to put ALL the file at the start of the disk !

Its kind of hit and miss; I repeated it a few times to get it. Sometimes, it only moves it to a certain point; then you do it again and it'll move it in some more (enough to resize down to some max amount; ie it'll move it down a little so you can make it 50 GB, but not less than 50GB since some data is at 49 GB, etc).

I also had to experiment with all the different defrag methods -- there's teh "SMART" placement, and then another and another. There's also an option to defrag metadata or something like that. I forgot what I used but I tried a few and there was one that moves the data down somewhat.

Hope that helps.