Lenovo Recovery & disk reformatting

[Davidhs]

As my Win7 Pro system is showing increasingly erratic behaviour, I should like to reinstall / repair it - without losing too much of my data if possible.

My W520 Win 7 64 Pro SP1 system is non standard in that when i first get it I installed an msata 80GB SDD as a C: drive for Windows. The original HDD contains my D: for data and programs plus the original recovery etc partitions as shipped by Lenovo. To conserve valuable C: space regularly deleted many of the downloaded updates and so am no longer able to uninstall SP1.

The options seem to be:
- the nicest would have been a simple re-install using the original DVD which avoids destroying anything other than Windows itself, but that is apparently not possible if one has SP1 and it cannot be backed out / uninstalled.
- I could start from scratch with a reformat of C: and use the Windows DVDs
- or I could and perhaps should try to use the Lenovo recovery partition.

When I start the latter approach, I receive an unhelpful message to the effect that all data on my "harddisk" will be lost.

That raises critical questions:
- which disk will be deleted, my C: (on the SDD), or will it go to the original "hardisk" and thus delete stuff on D: my data partition?
- Is the Lenovo recovery utility intelligent enough to see that C: is on a different physical device than the original spinning disk and then only reformat the C: partition?

Any thoughts anyone please?