Monday, September 12, 2011

Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition

Deleting the service partition will recover disc space, however this is a non-trivial exercise.

The basic procedure is to restore a partial image of the HDD to a new HDD. The main partition  is restored only. The manufacturers service partition (IBMSERVICE in the case of Lenovo) is NOT restored.

You can also increase the size of the HDD at the same time - going from a 30G or 40G drive with only 20G of usable space all the way to a 320G, 500G or more - all space usable!

Alternatively you can completely re-install Windows (or the operating system of your choice) after reformatting your hard drive. All of the drivers, for Lenovo at least, are available for Windows on the Lenovo website. You may have more of a problem with obtaining Linux drivers. Lenovo/IBM/Thinkpad do have a very active support forum.

Other posts related to RRBACKUPS on this blog:

1 comment:

Reykjavik said...

Also visited the RRBACKUPS page