How to recover the the T420 factory MBR

[agnul]

I'm running a dual boot (Linux + Windows7) T420 and during an eventful linux upgrade I ended up with GRUB installed on the MBR, so I can no longer access recovery mode pressing the "thinkvantage" button at boot time. Is there a way to fix this whithout reimaging the whole disk?

Also, out of curiosity, can someone explain the partition layout/default boot sequence? On my system I have

• SYSTEM_DRV
• Windows7_OS
• (... my linux partitions ...)
• Lenovo_Recovery

What is the SYSTEM_DRV for? Which partition is active by default?

[mereTz]

From my experience with linux & windows i'd say that in order to rescue the MBR you should use the old fashioned method: isert the windows disc and go in rescue mode, i think it was a command fixmbr ( or something like that ) this means you will no longer have grub & linux access.

Regarding the partitions, i'm guessing that the T400 has a preloaded set of drivers for windows which are used in case of recovery. The active partition should be the one with Windows7_OS.

[agnul]

From what I understand recent thinkpads have a custom MBR that allows to go straight to the recovery mode pressing the "thinkvantage" button at boot, so the vanilla MBR from Windows is not what I'm looking for. Also booting linux isn't a problem, I'm comfortable with editing boot.ini or using bcedit to add linux to the windows boot loader. I'm just nitpicking, I'd like to restore things as they were. 

[Mornsgrans]

System_DRV is created since Windows Vista automatically and is the as "active" marked partition for Windows boot.

[JDay]

You should have a boot option in the Grub menu that gets you into recovery.

[agnul]

Yep, but what I would like is to have the "thinkvantage" button to work its magic again

[Mornsgrans]

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agnul schrieb:

Yep, but what I would like is to have the "thinkvantage" button to work its magic again

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My experiences under Windows XP:

If Grub is installed in the MBR, Windows could not boot after recover to factory defaults. There only appeared a "GR" (from "GRUB") in the upper left corner.

The MBR additionally had to be overwritten with fdisk /mbr from MS-DOS, because R&R couldn't over write it.

I don't know, whether R&R nowadays does it do now. - Otherwise it makes no sense, to add the Thinkvantage-/F11-Key function.

[agnul]

Newbie question (hey, it's my first Lenovo ;-)): what's R&R?

[andyP Community SuperMod]

R&R is one of Lenovo's Thinkvantage tools called Rescue and Recovery, for more information you could take a look at this site which has an explanation and video presentation.