How to make your own recovery partition - PC Magazine

[GomJabbar]

I received this in an e-mail from PC Magazine today. I thought some of you partitionholics might be interested.

Make a Recovery Partition

Many PCs come with recovery CDs that will restore your system to factory-new condition, but you can get the job done faster—and add all your favorite programs and system settings to the restoration—by creating a recovery partition. A partition, of course, is a cordoned-off section of your hard drive that gets its own drive letter. All you need is the right software and enough available space to hold your stuff.

[bigtiger]

interesting article.

Well, if you have to use a bookup cd (in that case, the ghost cd), I think it does not help too much.

I wish there will be a solution to make our own partition, ideally a hidden part, so that when the computer crashed, we just boot from that partition and do the installation.

[GomJabbar]

I wish there will be a solution to make our own partition, ideally a hidden part, so that when the computer crashed, we just boot from that partition and do the installation.

I don't know exactly what you mean by that. Nearly all the newer ThinkPads have the service partition (recovery partition) that you can use to restore the Factory Contents - meaning: Windows, IBM/Lenovo drivers and software. This will get your ThinkPad up and running like the recovery partition in the article above. The difference is that the recovery partition in the PC Magazine article lets you add your own software and data files to it.

Both the IBM/Lenovo method and the PC Magazine method let you make scheduled backups to remain current. The IBM/Lenovo method stores your backups on the Windows C: partition using Rescue and Recovery (sometimes with Rapid Restore Ultra). The PC Magazine method stores your backups in the recovery partition. Either method will allow you to store your backup on a different hard drive (if you have one).

[bigtiger]

Well, I mean to create a cutomized partition with all the software installed and optimized, rather than just "Go back to Original Factory setting". To my knowledge, the default Lenovo cannot do this. That is why I usually delete that partition and use Norton Ghost to create an image in stead.

[GomJabbar]

If you're REALLY interested, take a read of the ThinkVantage Technologies Deployment Guide.