Make a bootable O/S from your hard drive.

[batmeat]

I'm on my laptop for school. It's a Lenovo T61. I had to buy it for school and wasn't given a choice of what to get. Anyway, it didn't come with any cd's. The operating system as well as all utilities are on a hidden partition. I can restore the O/S by holding down the 'ThinkVantage' button when I power up the laptop. I want to know if it's possible to create an install cd/dvd from that hidden partition so I can then delete the partition and recover and use the free space. Anyone know how? IBM wants to charge me a fee to mail out the cd's, which I don't want to pay for.

[etnietering]

If you boot into the recovery partition, there might be an option in there to create backup disks.

[batmeat]

There's not. I've been playing around in the bios to see if I can unhide that partition, but I can't. I have partition magic 8 so I'll install it and go from there.

[etnietering]

Yeah partition magic might be able to unhide it. I generally have better luck running PM off the liveCD, instead of within windows. Even if you are able to unhide it and burn a copy, it might not be bootable off of a DVD or whatever.
This gives me a good reason to never buy a Lenovo.

[#43 fan]

Originally Posted by etnietering

Yeah partition magic might be able to unhide it. I generally have better luck running PM off the liveCD, instead of within windows. Even if you are able to unhide it and burn a copy, it might not be bootable off of a DVD or whatever.
This gives me a good reason to never buy a Lenovo.

I also have a Lenovo, and my OS isn't hidden.
More than likely it was the school that did it, if I could guess.
Lenovo is also one of the more reliable brands of Laptops, too.

[batmeat]

Yeah, Lenovo is 'THE' most durable laptop there is without spending an arm and leg.

For clarification, the O/S isn't hidden. The recovery partition is hidden. I want to unhide that partition, then make an instal cd from it. I realize I can't just copy the partition to a cd/dvd. It's a 5Gb partition, most of which I'm sure I don't need.

[no1_vern]

Not to be a pessimist, but its cheap(good) insurance to keep the hidden service partition on the hard drive. Unless you ABSOLUTELY NEED to remove it, I urge you to leave it alone.

BTW, you can make a recovery CD/dvd -

Create Rescue Media or Product Recovery CD

Go to “All Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Rescue and Recovery Media. Then select your desirable type of rescue media. To create recovery CD, check the “Create a set of Product Recovery Discs now” and then click “OK” to start the creation process.

You will need about 7 cds or 1 cd and 1 dvd for the product recovery cd. And you also need to have CDRW or DVDRW drive. An external USB driver will do the job too as alternative.

Im thinking he means external USB drive .

[batmeat]

That utility on my laptop only copies around 300mb of data. It's not a 'true' recovery utility. I finally ended up copying the preload partition to a dual layer dvd and dumping the partition. I'm going to mount that partition onto my desktop, sift through the data, and create my own instal disc.