-T400- What's the real deal with those 3 partition? -HELP-

Hey guy, I've been searching on the forum to find some information about those 3 different partition that the T400 have upon arrival, and didn't found that much...?

I would like to know if I could create only 1big partition without taking huge risk of scrapping my very good T400 experience so far! (I don't even have it more than 1 week)

I would like to do a clean install of Vista Ultimate x64 on a freshly formatted and partitioned to 1 PARTITION ONLY t400.

Is it feasible?

Yes I did the recovery disk on CD-R. It took 12 of them exactly.

Will those CD work if I want to restore my system to "default" ?

Will I have to recreate those 3 partitions?

That are my question and thank you alot!

Proud owner of a T400 !

 

I had 3 partitions on my x200, and deleted one before I partitioned it thoroughly for multi-boot. Those 12 discs will probably restore all 3 partitions, I don't think you can customize the restore too heavily with them.

After creating those 12 discs, it should have asked if you wanted to delete the recovery partition, I clicked yes, it deleted it, and it automatically expanded my Vista partition to fill the gap. I would leave the Service partiton ('S' by default), because it is small, and is probably required to make the Thinkvantage button work at boot, and perform maintenance like fixing the MBR, doing memory scans, etc. You can however scrap the recovery partition if you have already made a backup, and recover the 10 GB or so back into your Windows partition.

In summary you can get to two partitions safely. One little service partition, and one big Windows partition. A single partition may be possible, but I wouldn't recommend it.

 

There are 3:

C: drive (regular partition)

Q: drive (about 10GB; this has all the recovery/apps info; the recovery DVD you make basically are made from this data). Also the ThinkVantage tools can use this partition to re-install an app, driver, etc.

S: drive (about 1.5GB; this is the recovery partition for ThinkVantage to recovery if Vista goes fubar; it covers basic boot to the point where it can access the Q: drive (and recovery data (OS, apps).

This is my guess; someone please correct if wrong.

 

With jonlumpkin's reply, I understand that I should keep the S: partition...

but with mikec's reply, it just don't seems to correspond with jonlumpkin since S: is the partition to boot up to be able to use the Q: partition?

So... I'm still confused...

anyone can give us more explanation?

Thanks for the reply guys!

Very appreciated!

 

The S partition holds the essential system tools that allow your system to recover from drive screwups and the like automatically (fix MBR, perform diagnostic checks on RAM, load disk images, etc). However, it does not contain an actual image of the drive.

The Q partition holds the factory image of your drive, and is used by the S partition, if you choose to restore to factory settings (e.g. after getting a virus). If you make the recovery cd/dvd set, you can safely delete the Q partition (the Rescue and Recovery tool will ask for your disks), but I would hold onto the S partition.

 

Alright thanks for the answer !