How to hide service partition, W500, Windows Vista?

[gpvillamil]

On my W500 there is a service partition (S:), that really doesn't need to be touched. I'm OK to have it there, just wondering if there is some non-destructive way of hiding it.

[Wendy]

I don't believe there is any way you can hide it. If you've created restore disks this is what is used to help restore you machine back to factory specs.

You can get yourself a set of back up disks from Lenovo and then get rid of it if you want the space.

I bought a smaller hard drive with my config and then bought a 250 western digital scorpio and put my own operating system on it. I keep my original drive intact and using the multibay drive adapter was able to find all the drivers and software I needed on the original drive and none of the fluff that they include.

[gpvillamil]

This trick worked:

http://tomstricks.blogspot.com/2008/08/ ... -hard.html

It prevents a drive from showing up in Explorer or in the File dialog, but the drive is still accessible to applications, and by manually entering its path.

[Wendy]

Nice site to file away for future info.

[Marin85]

Just for the record: one can also hide a partition using Acronis Disk Director, but I´m not sure if there is any freeware version of this tools suite.

[basketb]

Quick question for the OP. Was the service partition not hidden out of the box or did you do something to make it visible? (I've never seen this on any of the Thinkpads I received)

[gpvillamil]

Quick question for the OP. Was the service partition not hidden out of the box or did you do something to make it visible? (I've never seen this on any of the Thinkpads I received)

It was always visible from day one, out of the box. There was also another partition, drive Q:, containing an image of recovery media, but that one had a program to remove itself once the recovery media had been burned to disk.