T510 rescue and recovery

[harken]

I am replacing my disk drive with a solid state drive.  Are the recovery media disks - created using the thinkvantage toolkit (under factory recovery disks) - images of the entire c drive or only what was installed by lenovo?  Thanks

[ZaZ]

It will put the machine back to it's factory state, not the entire drive.

[harken]

thx

[harken]

What is the best way to recover factory state plus all system updates

[CorkyG]

"What is the best way to recover factory state plus all system updates?"

Cloning the drive or full backup to an external or separate internal drive. You are looking at apples and oranges.  You already have the recovery image for initial factory condition.  Subsequent updates are a different beast.

If I were replacing my HDD with a SSD, and the HDD was fully AOK, I would clone it to the SSD.  Then swap the drives and put the HDD away.  That would be my recovery drive.  The recovery poartition can then be eliminated on the SSD.

When I buy a new Thinkpad, I get it with the cheapest HDD possible.  On receipt, I clone that to a bigger faster HDD and put the original away.  It is the recovery drive, and the recovery partition is no longer needed on the new drive.

[CorkyG]

"What is the best way to recover factory state plus all system updates?"

Cloning the drive or full backup to an external or separate internal drive. You are looking at apples and oranges.  You already have the recovery image for initial factory condition.  Subsequent updates are a different beast.

If I were replacing my HDD with a SSD, and the HDD was fully AOK, I would clone it to the SSD.  Then swap the drives and put the HDD away.  That would be my recovery drive.  The recovery poartition can then be eliminated on the SSD.

When I buy a new Thinkpad, I get it with the cheapest HDD possible.  On receipt, I clone that to a bigger faster HDD and put the original away.  It is the recovery drive, and the recovery partition is no longer needed on the new drive.

[JDay]

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harken wrote:

What is the best way to recover factory state plus all system updates

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Restore using the factory restore disc set you created, download updates from MS update. Be sure you run the WEI benchmark so that Windows knows it is installed on an SSD otherwise Windows will not optimize the system for the SSD (no need to manually tweak anything). I would not image the old drive over to the SSD since your SSD may be out of alignment if you do and will not run at full speed.

[CorkyG]

If you clone the drive using Acronis TI 2012, the alignment will be correct.