Newbie Question guys hope you can help.....

[ace2109]

Hi guys,
first of all i just want to say hello to everyone and let you all know that this is the first time i have been on these forums. My Brother told me about the forums last night as he bought an IBM Thinkpad a few months back and you guys helped him out a great deal.

I have just bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad R60e. It comes with a 60gb HDD but i know space will be taken up by the recovery partition. I have been reading through different posts and got part answers to my question but just wanted to ask before i wreck my new Laptop.

The Question:
If i create recovery disks, can i format my hdd, create partitions and reload windows from the recovery disks?

Thanks for all your help on this one guys and i look forward to reading your replies.

ace

[fbrdphreak]

I believe the recovery discs will recreate all of the factory partitions, including the service partition and Windows partition. I'm not sure if there is an option to NOT create the service partition as I've not used the discs.

Personally I'd leave the service partition. On new models, it doesn't take up much space (<5GB these days, compared to 10GB+ on older models) and could end up being very useful.

Oh, and this thread should be in a the ThinkPad R-series section

[NS]

<snip>Personally I'd leave the service partition. On new models, it doesn't take up much space (<5GB these days, compared to 10GB+ on older models) and could end up being very useful.

My R52 service partition only takes up around 3-4GB of HDD space.

You can used the BIOS to set the service partition as visible and delete it if you want in the C:/ drive and once you deleted the service partition, you cannot reset the HDD back to factory state without the R & R disks.

The first step to remove ThinkPad service partition is to unhide and unprotect the service partition in the BIOS. ThinkPad BIOS will overwrite the HDD controller so that the disk will assume the space allocated to service partition doesn’t exist in order to safeguard the partition from accidental deletion. Press F1 or Access IBM at the beginning of the boot sequence when the ThinkPad boots up. In the BIOS setup menu, go to Security, and then set the IBM PreDesktop Area to Disabled.

Now you can use any partition manager such as fdisk, diskpart, BootIt NG or Partition Magic to manipulate the partition, either delete the partition and create a new partition on reclaimed space, or merge the service partition to existing partition. If you having trouble trying to delete the service partition, try to boot to DOS, or use a bootable partition manager.

Alternatively, if you have a non-IBM/Lenovo laptop or older IBM/Lenovo laptop that doesn’t HPA-aware, you can download Feature Tool from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The IBM’s (Hitachi’s) Drive Feature Tool can also remove the Hidden Protected Area service partition by changing the capacity of the hard disk.