Thinkpads Forum

After restoring my x61 to factory state using the service partition, I burned the DVDs so as to be able to do so in future as well, and decided to delete the partition. I used diskpart to delete it and attempted to install windows 7 on the whole drive. I obviously failed at this and am still trying to figure out how to either merge the former service partition with the main partition or how to reinstall vista or 7 and force the partitions to merge into a single partition. If anyone has any ideas, they would be very welcome.


http://i43.tinypic.com/2dj7wb6.jpg
In the meantime, I took this screenshot and I wondered what the heck Disk 0 is. What is this 513 MB disk? Anyone have any ideas? I'm thinking maybe turbo memory, but I honestly don't know.

If it is turbo memory, is that a physically distinct disk from the hard drive or is it just a virtual distinction (like a partition)? As a follow up, if it is a physically distinct disk, that would make it impossible to format when formatting the hard drive, right? (So I don't need to worry about accidentally breaking it.)

For everything related to disks and partitions, I usually use Partition Magic. Though I only have (mostly good) experience with it on XP.

My vote goes for Acronis Disk Director, it´s very powerful, fast and reliable and has "saved my @$$" many times before in different situations. (For these reasons) it´s not free but it is available as shareware AFAIK.

As for your original question, just a speculation, but if this was Turbo Memory, it wouldn´t appear under Volume C:, right

Marin

Right-click on "Disk 0", choose "Properties"...?

loyukfai wrote:Right-click on "Disk 0", choose "Properties"...?

On the properties screen, it says,

"IMD-0

Device type: disk drives
Manufacturer: (Standard disk drives)
Location: 0(0)"

Under the volumes tab, it says,

"Disk: Disk 0
Type: Basic
Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)
Capacity: 513 MB
Unallocated space: 513 MB
Reserved space: 0 MB"

That's your ReadyDrive memory.

bananaman wrote:That's your ReadyDrive memory.

So, if I understand ReadyDrive correctly (and Wikipedia is fairly accurate), this is related to my Turbo Memory.

So, back to my more basic question. Is it possible to screw this up?

Is it a physically distinct disk from the hard drive or is it just a virtual distinction (like a partition)? As a follow up, if it is a physically distinct disk, that would make it impossible to format when formatting the hard drive, right? (So I don't need to worry about accidentally breaking it.)

If it is not physically distinct, does Windows automatically create this allocation when it installs?

The TurboMemory is a fast-readable flash memory inside your Thinkpad which you can use to boot up a operating system faster.
Windows since Version Vista can use it automatically to speed the boot up, so always storing some different data to it (most recently used stuff I guess). That means you can't really "screw it up" as it is not intended for permanent storage of somekind of data.

And at the moment you just have one partition on Disk 1, the other part is not an partition, it is unallocated.
So, to keep the data on drive C:, I would recommend the free live cd of gparted, just download it, burn the iso to a cd-r, and boot up from that. I already used it very often and never had any problems:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
There you can just resize the partition to the whole disk size

The turbo memory needs a driver (from intel), but that's all. I have one in my laptop, but I ran timing tests with and without it and the differences are either "hard to measure" or "virtually none", depending on how you look at it

Isn't it just meant to be a device for a fast swapfile and/or to speed boot up?

So how much was the difference with it to boot, and without it? And what did you count as "fully booted up". Probably very hard to measure.

And when you can use it like a fast drive, you can probably do with it what you want... For Linux I imagine making something like a large initial ramdisk to read from there, to speed boot up for linux, aswell.

Is it/ can it be leveraged by Windows 7/8 automatically or do one of the following things need to be done?

- Driver
- Configure it?

PS: If its not being used for the boot, can it be used by Us, personally as some storage space? (Format it etc?)