Boot from mSATA SSD with Recovery Partition on hard disk [ Edited ]

[JNavas]

I've upgraded my X220 with an 80GB mSATA SSD, and initialized the mSATA SSD from Recovery Media, which leaves me with Recovery Partitions on both the SSD (new boot/system drive) and the hard disk (now data drive). Is there a way to point the blue ThinkVantage button to the Recovery Partition on the hard disk so I can free the space occupied by the Recovery Partition on the SSD without losing its functionality? Thanks!

[cybergibbons]

I would be very interested to see the answer to this as well.

[ColonelONeill]

I think it might be possible, but you'd have to make some changes to the boot options. Not sure exactly how that's done though.

[JNavas]

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JNavas wrote:

I've upgraded my X220 with an 80GB mSATA SSD, and initialized the mSATA SSD from Recovery Media, which leaves me with Recovery Partitions on both the SSD (new boot/system drive) and the hard disk (now data drive). Is there a way to point the blue ThinkVantage button to the Recovery Partition on the hard disk so I can free the space occupied by the Recovery Partition on the SSD without losing its functionality? Thanks!

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Lenovo?

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

John,

We can look into this, but please keep in mind that this is a peer to peer support forum which means that we can't follow up on every discussion thread.   This is in line with other OEM forums.

Mark

[JNavas]

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Mark_Lenovo wrote:

John,

We can look into this, but please keep in mind that this is a peer to peer support forum which means that we can't follow up on every discussion thread.   This is in line with other OEM forums.

Mark

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Fair enough -- should I place a Support call?

Forum practices vary considerably from vendor to vendor.

UPDATE: To be fair, I'm making a number of assumptions here:

 1. That Lenovo is not currently selling mSATA SSD only due to supply shortages.

 2. That Lenovo will eventually sell mSATA SSD both in new systems and as accessories.
 3. That Lenovo will probably sell the same Intel mSATA SSD that I've added to my X220 (a main reason I selected it).

 4. That Lenovo will eventually sell systems with mSATA SSD for OS and HDD for data.

 5. That Lenovo will support Recovery Partition on HDD to free up precious space on mSATA SSD.

 6. That ThinkVantage Tools like Rescue and Recovery are important assets both to Lenovo and to customers.

If true, I believe it reasonable to think Lenovo would be able to provide the information I've asked for.

[JNavas · Accepted solution]

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JNavas wrote:

I've upgraded my X220 with an 80GB mSATA SSD, and initialized the mSATA SSD from Recovery Media, which leaves me with Recovery Partitions on both the SSD (new boot/system drive) and the hard disk (now data drive). Is there a way to point the blue ThinkVantage button to the Recovery Partition on the hard disk so I can free the space occupied by the Recovery Partition on the SSD without losing its functionality? Thanks!

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At long last there appears to be a Lenovo solution for managing X220 systems with both mSATA SSD and HDD --

see my thread RapidDrive Advanced for X220.

[gurachn]

Hi John,

I had very much the same question, as discussed in this thread http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Where-is-my-recovery-media/td-p/579821

The difference being that I had already deleted the recovery partition from my SSD, reclaimed the space (80GB isn't huge), renamed my drives, and then discovered that I couldn't make my recovery media.

It turns out that the problem I was having is that at some point, the Levovo_Recovery drive was renamed to G:

This prevented the recovery media program from finding the necessary data.

I renamed it back to Q: and was able to create the recovery media on a 16 GB USB drive without problem.

Hope thats helpful.

[JNavas]

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gurachn wrote:

Hi John,

I had very much the same question, as discussed in this thread http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Where-is-my-recovery-media/td-p/579821

The difference being that I had already deleted the recovery partition from my SSD, reclaimed the space (80GB isn't huge), renamed my drives, and then discovered that I couldn't make my recovery media.

It turns out that the problem I was having is that at some point, the Levovo_Recovery drive was renamed to G:

This prevented the recovery media program from finding the necessary data.

I renamed it back to Q: and was able to create the recovery media on a 16 GB USB drive without problem.

Hope thats helpful.

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Thanks. As it happens, I'm in the process of doing the same thing. I had thought the X220 was able to boot into the recovery partition like earlier ThinkPads I've owned, but now I see it won't, so there's no reason not to remove the recovery data after saving it.