Hidden partition?

[stefan2]

Hey,
I bought a lenovo thinkpad R61 about 8 months ago, and 3 months later i decided to format my laptop and install it with windows XP instead of vista. I never got any cd's of vista but there was a hidden partition with which i could restore the laptop to its orginal condition.

Now i want to do this but i don't know how. I also don't know how to see if the hidden partition still exists. Is it possible that you delete such a partition by accident when formatting your laptop?

Hope you can help me out a bit

Thanks in advance.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the Forum.
You can get a set of recovery disks from Lenovo, or put in "a LF: (Looking For)" ad in our Market Forum.
You could also try and go into the BIOS and see if the Restore Option is activated (it tells you to Show F11 at bootup). If that option is grayed out, you'll need the Recovery Disks.
You can also try and hit the ThinkPad/ThinkVantage button on your keyboard and if you are lucky it may offer you the option to restore.
Before you do that, backup all your personal data.

[K0LO]

...and to see if the recovery partition is still there, open XP Disk Management Console (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > then click on Disk Managment). If the partition is still there it will be about 5 GB in size.

[stefan2]

Thanks for the replies.

I looked in the bios and I could not find any option to restore. When i click the thinkvantage button it gives me 3 options of which non are to restore. However, when I look at the discmanagement, i see a Partition called "ServiceV002" which has 5,99 GB of space (394 MB unused space). I guess that should be the recovery partition. I'm downloading the rescue and recovery program from ibm's website now. Maybe I can restore using that program?

You got any other idea how to restore? or why the other options didnt work?

Thanks.

[RealBlackStuff]

When you installed a different OS, it changed something in the MBR. The result is that your current XP does not find the connection to the Recovery Partition. Maybe installing R&R might work, it's worth a shot.
I don't use any Recovery partitions (I use Acronis TrueImage instead) so I don't have any experience with R&R.

DON'T forget to back up your personal data!

[K0LO]

stefan2:

Installing Rescue & Recovery used to restore the IBM boot loader, which would restore operation of the ThinkVantage button, but that was on XP systems. I'm not sure if the newer systems with Vista pre-installed still work the same way.

Lenovo also has this utility for restoration of the ThinkVantage button functionality. You will need a USB floppy drive to use it, however.

Another option is to install GRUB as a boot loader and use it to directly boot into the recovery partition.

[stefan2]

Ah i installed rescue and recovery and the blue thinkvantage button worked again. At least i got into the rescu & recovery program when i clicked it during booting. However when i wanted to restore to the orginal fabric settings, with which my laptop was delivered, it said that the functionality to restore to fabric settings was deleted. So i can not restore using that anymore.

I will now try to download and use grub.

Thanks.

[K0LO]

Since you are now able to boot into the recovery partition using the ThinkVantage button, adding GRUB will not add anything you cannot already do.

You may need the recovery disks to restore to factory state, or perhaps you can contact Lenovo to ask why the recovery partition will not allow you to do this.

[stefan2]

-- edited

didnt see your reply when i posted.
Ah ok thanks i will contact them .

[Quantique]

And what did they say??