Deleting "Lenovo" drive in new t500

I recently bought a Lenovo t500 with vista home basic 32 bit installed. My HDD is only 160 GB, and it seems that Lenovo has broken this up into three parts: the regular C: (125 GB), a recovery part (about 1.5 GB), and a Lenovo part (about 20GB). I have looked into the Lenovo one and there seems to be nothing there so I am wondering if I can somehow combine this with the main part so that most of my hard drive is all together. Is this possible? And if so, will it affect anything on my laptop?

 

You can't combine the partitions, but you can delete the Lenovo partition. This partition is used for the recovery image (restore to factory settings).

If you double click on the drive in explorer, you should be greeted by a wizard. You can follow this and make recovery discs (1 CD for boot, and 2 DVDs for the image). You will then be prompted to delete the drive (and automatically extend the Windows partition to fill the vacated space).

If you ever need to restore your laptop to factory (e.g. intend to sell it in the future), you can then use the recovery DVDs you made.

However, I would leave the small service partition. This has a handful of Lenovo tools (including the predesktop environment), can be quite useful, and is small. I also believe the MBR is located on the service partition so you should keep it.

 

To be clear, the 1-CD and 2-DVD set recovery process will restore all three partitions, regardless of whether or not they exist anymore, correct? In other words, I could restore from that disc set on a completely blank, new hard drive, and the result would be all the same partitions that existed in the machine when I took it out of the box, right?

 

Bump. Still looking for a definitive answer on this one.

 

That is correct. You will recover the drive (any drive) to factory.

If partitions (or an OS) exist, they will be eliminated in the process.

 

Just wanted to comment on that... Well, I got rid of all Lenovo partitions and repartitioned the whole drive. I see no point in recovering the machine to factory state because it's simply unusable.

I got my X200s some time ago and tried to use the preloaded Vista Business, I really did. But it was unbelievably SLOW and was crashing all the time (stock X200s with 4gb of RAM). I haven't even got a chance to install ANY additional software - it was happening on a "fresh" system, started for the very first time. So I really don't know how one's supposed to use that kind of OS. And just to think that they say Lenovo doesn't load too much bloatware so I can't even imagine what it looks like on other brand's laptops...

So just do yourself a favor, wipe the drive and do a clean install of OS. Even if it's Vista it will work MUCH better than factory installed one.

I know it's only vaguely related to this thread but I'm simply amazed that laptops (or PCs in general) manufactures expect people to use their factory-broken windows...

 

@whtvr - That's usually what I do as well. Total wipe and reinstall. I just wanted to make sure the recovery discs involved a complete snapshot of the drive, including the service *and* image partitions. I don't see myself using the image partition for anything other than resale prep, but I would like to be able to get the service partition back so I can still use the ThinkVantage boot-time tools.

 

Their Vista is already installed with a bunch of useless stuff that's what's causing the slowing down. But I agree just get a clean OS install.