rescue / recovery restore

[mou]

After a 6 week odyssey I finally got the X301 today. So far I am very impressed by the sturdy and leightweight design (it's my first thinkpad...). The screen is very bright and the viewing angles work out OK for me. Battery life is as I expected with the 6-cell (not great but alright), but I might be getting the additional 3-cell.

First thing I did after booting up XP was creating a complete set of rescue & recovery DVDs (two DVDs). My question now is, as I am about to get rid of the whole hidden recovery partition (5GB are lots of space on a 64GB drive, esp. as I'm planning on a dual boot system...): Will I be able to restore the harddisk state as it was when the laptop shipped (including the extra hidden partition) with this set of DVDs or will they only restore the "main" partition - in that case I would probably try to get an image of the complete HDD additionally.
Thanks for you help!

[hsjC]

From my experience with my Z61t, the recovery disks restore both the hidden partition and the windows partition.

Actually windows vista's built-in backup/restore feature worked pretty well for me too. Faster and more convenient.

Hopefully I'll be getting an X200s soon

[mou]

alright, thanks a lot