Thinkpads Forum

http://www.kensfi.com/cannot-create-ano ... ent-170212

I am struggling with this...I have somehow wasted the one opportunity to make recovery disks, and I want to restore the PC to original factory state.
It came with preinstalled win 7, and upgrade disks for windows 8.
No recovery media were given for win seven, I want to achieve two things>
1. get the machine to original state
2. generate new DVD disks for total win 7 recovery, from the q recovery partition.

I am pasting a good tutorial on this:

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Abhishek says:
OCTOBER 8, 2012 AT 6:57 AM
Finally, i tried this option and it works.
If you have data present in lenovo recovery partition intact, then go to Q:/lenovo_recovery/factoryrecovery/ and try to locate two files cdrivebackup.wim and sdrivebackup.wim.
Detach the hard disk of your laptop and connect as a external hard disk to second laptop. Open Easus partition master software to create two partitions on your external hard disk. First is S:SYSTEM_DRIVE and second as Windows7_OS (no need to assign drive letter C: to second partition). Now use 7-zip software or powerISO software to extract the sdrivebackup.wim image to S:SYSTEM_DRIVE. Similarly, extract contents of cdrivebackup.wim image to Windows7_OS partition on external hard disk.
Now, disconnect your hard disk and re-connect it to your laptop hard-disk slot. Now use any windows7 installation disc (you may get lot of such .iso images from torrents) to boot into system. Eventually when system asks you to install windows7 into partitions, do not do anything. Simply press “Shift+F10″ to get a command prompt.
Once you get command prompt. Do following.
1) issue command “diskpart”
2) Issue command “list disk”
3) issue command “select disk 0″
4) issue command “list partition”
5) issue command “select partition
You can easily guess the partition by looking at the size of
partition “Windows7_OS”.
6) assign drive letter C: to that partition
7) Now issue command “active”
exit from diskpart by issuing command “exit”
9) Restart your PC.
I hope this will help. I have another solution if you don’t have a second laptop or if you are not able to arrange a second laptop for your help.
Thanks
Abhishek

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This tutorial worked excellently for me...I got to a state of Windows is setting up your computer for first use.
However, the installation / when first booting into the newly restored factory system/ failed.

I suspect the reason for the failure is the way I extracted the .wim image , as per the tutorial.
What you see on the picture below is my system drive,/ now mounted on my normal desktop/ , the newly generated one using the tutorial.


with the laptop's hdd mounted via SATA to my tesktop, the wim archive was extracted by 7zip to a
partition called WINDOWS_OS
then tweaked via Diskpart, again in line with the tutorial.
Problem is, for some reason 7zip generated a subfolder called 1, and put everything in there.
That surely isnt right...
any suggestions? using some other extractor, or mounting this .wim in its original tool, eximage or whatever?
I would like to avoid eximage, I am not familiar with it and would waste time.
I guess it is hard for the installer to set up windows if all the system is hidden in a sub folder called D:\1...

WOULD APPRECIATE ANY HELP..THX TO ALL

I am now doing my last try, using this tutorial:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkVantag ... d-p/434477

very time consuming...I am downloading something called the WAIK. it will take ages. shame on lenovo for having customers going trought this. Or maybe is it the fault of Microsoft? maybe it is their requirement...to nag people, because of piracy.

SUCCESS, AT Last.
I struggled two nights, combined about three tutorials...in the end, I ended up with a bootable USB stick containing some kind of win seven recovery and the imagex.exe tool.
I was furious at the tutorial for this...there were instructions to copy files in command line...I thought there was a mysterious IT guru reason for that. Nope...could be done in Win Explorer...
got a cool crisp new install directtly from the q partition. I will also use this when I make the clone to ssd...I will paste the q partition onto the ssd, and then try unpack the .wim files onto the ssd, as if I was using the think vantage recovery envrnmt. will report back with results...