Disk Partioning and OneKey Recovery Feature

[interro]

I bought my Y510 in March 08, and have been limping along fighting the partition restrictions. I have really not made my laptop the all-purpose life control panel that I was looking for, instead sticking with my trusty XP desktop for most tasks, in fear that I would have to restructure, reformat, whatever, and waste all my efforts. This purchase was a big deal for me, and it has been discouraging to see that subsequent Ideapad releases were so much improved.

The bright side is that I have learned more about my computer, but I will still never pass for a power user. Mentally wrestling with an appliance is not what I had hoped for. The instructions for altering the partition structure, (but possibly voiding the warranty), alarm me, and I would like nothing more than an all-knowing Lenovo employee to magically contact me and say, Here is your fix, ta-daaaa! Speaking of that fix, uh, where is it? It is verging on mythical. Coming up on the one-year warranty expiration mark of my purchase - will I then not have access to Lenovo help in implementing whatever solution is put out? How do we know when it happens?

Just now, going to the Lenovo Support and Downloads page, or the Warranty Lookup page, or the Get Assistance page, I get only the "Our apologies. . .The page you requested cannot be displayed."404 message.

I do appreciate all the other wonderful helpful tips on this forum. Sorry to whine, I am just worried and frustrated.

[janicej]

Dear Interro -- I take it from your message that you have just about decided not to fight city hall.  If you can obtain some operating system disks from Lenovo, so that if worse comes to worse, you will still be able to reinstall this part of your system, I would join the others of us that have repartitioned our disks and have gone to other backup systems.  Bite the bullet, Lenovo will never have a "fix".... and, you really don't need them anyway.  Arrange to backup your complete system in some other manner -- along the lines suggested in these blogs.  There are a lot of good backup systems, and partition programs, available.  Buy a cheap, large USB attached exterior drive to keep your backup file on, and do it regularly so that the loss will be minimal when something does happen to your system.  From my personal point of view, the one-key, back up system provided by Lenovo for the Y 510 was a pure waste of time.  You do not lose ANYTHING by destroying it--your warranty is dead meat anyway.  The operating system (Windows XP or Vista) is the important thing to obtain, if you can... that and the Lenovo drivers that you need to set up the motherboard etc.  The rest is "fluff".  The one-key was never meant to save your personal programs and data, as you probably know.  It was only meant to reinstall the basic operating system and other files to get the computer operating again in case it crashed.  It wouldn't have saved you if your entire hard disk packed it in.  On the other hand, an exterior backup system could do this!  You can be back in business without missing a lick within an hour or so from an exterior backup system to a new harddrive.  So, your choice, but I sure know what I would do (and have done).  You may wait for doomsday for Lenovo to help out.

[6thSense]

kevin5203:

Just to add to your comment and as an interesting point...

- Lenovo Y430

- Did a new, full backup to external USB drive

- Created TWO sets of System Recovery DVD's: 2 disk at first latop turn on, 7 DVD's yesterday.

- Installed NEW 320 GB HD

- Inserted DVD # 1 of 7 and booted..

- From home screen of OneKey Recovery, was NOT able to SEE the External HD or image

- Selected default, from DVD.

- 1.5 hours later, system stuck on DVD #3 for 40 minutes, aborted.

- Next tried the 2 DVD set from install, finished installing both disk, rebootted and then NOTHING...blank screen

- Used Gparted and correct number of partitions created.

So bottom line as you stated, OneKey Recovery does NOT appear to work as I had hoped.

Hmm,  if one loses the hard disk, no way to re-build. I am going to contact Lenovo support...should  not be this hard...I recovered an HP laptop the other day and had it back up in one hour...

6thSense

[rstoegbauer]

acronis for life.....

[kevin5203]

I just bought  Acronis True Image Home 2009 (boxed dvd) from NewEgg.com for $39.99, free shipping.  I'm in networking...but a well experienced desktop tech at work told me he uses the previous versions of Acronis to clone his hard drives, and when one dies, he just swaps it out with a clone.  He said Acronis is not without issues, but it is better than Norton Ghost.  He hasn't tried Acronis to restore a backup image to a new drive.  He also said Lenovo does not support IdeaPads as well as the Thinkpads. 

[rstoegbauer]

well nothing is ever perfect... but givin the lenovo situations w/ partitioning, Acronis does provide a sector by sector copy into an image file, unfortunately the sector by sector nature puts it into an img file of the same size of the drive which exceeded my current resources and have been unable to test for authenticity... but as Kevin5203 has mentioned Acronis is better then Symantec's Norton Ghost, and id agree, id certainly consider Acronis numero uno.

[janicej]

Dear Kevin & Rstoegbauer -- I have  both Acronis and Ghost.  Although I have used Ghost (successfully) for many years and many times, I am about to flick in the towel on it.  I am currently using Ghost 9 on two of my machines and it really let me down just recently.  Something (a Win2000 update) screwed up my MBR so that Ghost thought the drive was unformatted or something and refused to reinstall the image.  I finally got everything sorted out, but that episode sure soured me on the easy use of the program.  What I do like about Ghost 9 is that you can reinstall individual files from the Ghost image.  This is handy when you don't want to scrape the drive clean to fix a problem.  I have never used Acronis to reinstall a full image, so to date I cannot testify to its easy use.  I don't see why the program would not install an old image on a new drive, however.  I am going to update the computer on which it currently resides, so I may be my big chance to test it out soon.  Anyway, I suspect that for "easy" straight forward drive renewal, both programs do the job just fine.  Just my two-bits.

[72guy]

I just bought StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop v.3.3. I'll let ya know how it works.

[dveda]

I just wanted to add something to this thread: I talked with a Lenovo person at support today and I asked him if the warranty is voided if you repartition the y510 hard drive and he said that the warranty is not lost. He even said that they would give me instructions on repartitioning if I wanted it. So some of the prior posts on this thread are erroneous in this regard.

[janicej]

Dveda -- I think you misunderstood the concern of the person whose computer was (a)uncomfortable because of the partition size and (b)worried that the warranty (when it expired after 1 year) would not cover the machine once altered.  Nice that Lenovo will now advise on how to partition the harddrive, but hard to see how this will help with machine (or harddrive) replacement when the warranty has expired.  Perhaps some people thought that changing the configuration would negate the machine warranty -- I don't think that most people did.  They were mostly concerned about the viability of the software and the one-key recovery.  JMO.