IdeaPad Y and U series Laptops

[#1]

Why does my Hard Disk Drive (HDD) capacity appear to be smaller than expected?

(This tip applies to Lenovo 3000 Y410, IdeaPad Y510, IdeaPad Y710, and Lenovo 3000 K100 Desktops)

Lenovo creates three partitions on the installed Hard Disk Drive:

 

1.     The smaller drive commonly known as the C drive which contains Windows and your pre-installed software. The C drive should NOT be resized otherwise your OneKey recovery may no longer operate.

2.     The larger drive known as the D drive which is ready for storing your personal data files such as videos, music, pictures etc. Both the C and D drives are visible in Windows but the D drive is MUCH larger to hold all your personal data. The C drive should NOT be resized otherwise your OneKey recovery may no longer operate.

3.     The Service Partition (the partition without a drive letter) is used by the OneKey recovery system to backup and recover the C partition. This invisible partition requires only 18GB to 20GB of HDD space. The service partition should NOT be deleted otherwise your OneKey recovery will no longer operate.

One advantage of having these partitions is the protection of your personal data. In the event you need to use the OneKey recovery system, the personal data stored on the D drive will not be erased as the files on the C drive are restored.

Disk Management is an installed tool which will allow you to view these three partitions. You may access Disk Management by selecting Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.

* Actual size of the invisible partition may vary based on the model and preload.

Message Edited by nonny on 03-29-2008 10:45 PM

[#2]

Does the Lenovo preload have the "My Documents" or the equivalent folder(s) in Vista mapped to the D:\ drive? That would make it much easier for the average user to store their data in the D:\ partition. Otherwise users may not know how to use the D:\ partition without instruction........and who reads the instructions anyway??

Personally I like this partitioning scheme and deploy it when my customers will allow it. It works even better when you put the favorites folder and outlook pst file in there.

[#3]

Oh wow. So Mark, in regards to my Youtube screw up. I could just go ahead and do a recovery and keep all my data as long as it's stored in D:?

In theory, it should be able to fix this issue as it would clean up what ever plugin/program installed wrong.

Am I correct?

[#4]

Yup, if all your personal data is on the D drive, then that's correct. It's like getting the machine direct from the factory again.

The restoration DVD that came with the computer should do the same thing too.

-Warr

[#5]

Great, I'll just go ahead and do this instead of messing around with all this install/uninstall stuff I was planning to do.

[#6]

"The C drive should NOT be resized otherwise your OneKey recovery may no longer operate."

While this is true to some extent, all hope is not lost. If you resized your partitions and then need to restore, you can just delete your resized partitions and then the recovery feature will work. Just take care when deleting partitions that you don't delete the recovery partition.

[#7]

I just remapped all of the major documents that will take up space on my Y510.

The lesson learned here is that if you want to remap the "Documents" folder for instance onto the D: drive, you will need to first create a folder that the "Documents" link will take over.  Otherwise, your documents will simply map to D: directly.  You don't even have to rename it, simply create a new folder and move all items to it.  Right click what you want to remap, select properties, and then click on the tab "Location."

[#8]

You should always keep ur files on a seperate partition, like we all know Windows has the tendency to fail often
What i did after downgrading to XP i resized my partition the way i like it, and i belive i got rid of the service parition.
But i used Ghost tool to make an image of my C: drive now instead of pressing my novo key i just pop  a CD in the drive boot from it and restore my windows to be nice and fresh works the same way :-D it takes about 10 min to restore with full drivers and some basic software.

[#9]

I do pretty much the same thing, but don't need the CD. What I did:

1. Use gparted to erase the hard drive, including the restoration partition.

2. Boot from a DOS floppy with a USB floppy drive or DOS formatted flash drive. Use DOS's fdisk and format to create a bootable DOS partition with Norton Ghost 2003 installed.

3. Boot from the XP CD and install XP into a new 30GB partition. An XP boot menu gets installed to let me selecte XP or DOS.

4. Boot from a Vista CD and install Vista into a new 40GB partition. A new Vista boot menu lets me pick from Vista or XP (which then lets me pick DOS).

5. Create a 150GB partition for my personal data. Ghost backup images of the OS partitions also get installed there. I make ghost images about once a month, and store older ones offline.

6. In the remaining 10GB of free spacen install your favorite Linux. I prefer Ubuntu. It adds another boot menu to let you pick windows or Linux. Use the Data partition to store data.

7. Now all your data is available to all your OSes, Boot into what you need.

8. By installing Ubuntu with Wubi, and by editing the Vista boot menu with something like VistaBootPro, you can shrink all the boot menus down to just one: Vista's own boot menu with new entries for Ghost and Linux.

Very handy.

-Warr


Message Edited by wernst on 03-12-2008 10:15 AM

[#10]

Theoretically there is an opportunity to create recovery partition with installed XP.
To do that we need to get OKR tool disc from Lenovo. Service centers have such CD.