z61t running win7. Need to restore it to factory settings.

[greel]

Hello everyone, I have a year and a half old z61t that came with Vista installed. Just a few month ago someone installed windows 7 RC on it, but didn't partition the hard drive when they did it. Now it's running win7, and I need to get it back to vista. Unfortunately I don't have any recovery media. When I open the disk management it shows the recovery partition at 5.47 gb, and healthy. Is there anyway that I can get to the recovery partition and bring the computer back to the original factory settings? The main problem here, I think, is that I can't use any of the thinkpad software to access the recovery data. That is, the blue thinkvantage button on the computer doesn't function with win7. Is there possibly a driver that I can download for it?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. If I didn't make anything clear, please just ask!

Thanks,
Galen

[mgo]

Hello everyone, I have a year and a half old z61t that came with Vista installed. Just a few month ago someone installed windows 7 RC on it, but didn't partition the hard drive when they did it. Now it's running win7, and I need to get it back to vista. Unfortunately I don't have any recovery media. When I open the disk management it shows the recovery partition at 5.47 gb, and healthy. Is there anyway that I can get to the recovery partition and bring the computer back to the original factory settings? The main problem here, I think, is that I can't use any of the thinkpad software to access the recovery data. That is, the blue thinkvantage button on the computer doesn't function with win7. Is there possibly a driver that I can download for it?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. If I didn't make anything clear, please just ask!

Thanks,
Galen

There's a slight chance you can download the "Rescue and Recovery" program from the Lenovo Z61 page and install it over Windows 7, since Windows 7 uses the Vista kernel. Then, it might be possible to restore your machine from that recovery partition by installing R & R and doing the 2 to 3 hour recovery procedure.

Or, somebody on this forum might sell you the Z61 recovery disk set, or Lenovo support may sell you a set. If that "someone" installed Windoew 7 without your permission perhaps they ought to pay for the replacement disk set.

[greel]

Oh.

haha.

Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. I downloaded the recovery software and then was able to restore it completely by doing the whole 'hit the f11 button repeatedly during startup' thing to get to the menu. Excellent.

Thanks again. =) Now I will not have to make my brother pay for recovery discs. haha.

-Galen

[mgo]

Oh.

haha.

Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. I downloaded the recovery software and then was able to restore it completely by doing the whole 'hit the f11 button repeatedly during startup' thing to get to the menu. Excellent.

Thanks again. =) Now I will not have to make my brother pay for recovery discs. haha.

-Galen

Excellent! Thanks for reporting back. Now, others will know that one can use Lenovo's Vista utilities on Windows 7 to solve similar problems.