Lenovo One-Key Recovery Feature broken after resizing partition

Question

I am in a stick situation with dual-booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu, and I want to wipe my computer to factory settings.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y510P with Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.04 Dual-Booted. I also had to install rEFInd in order to get things "working."

I first discovered a problem when I went to start Lenovo One-Key Recovery (Version 8) in Windows, and selected the "System Recovery" option. I received the error:

"The program cannot find the service partition. The selected service is unavailable."

After a little googling, I came across the source of my problem: resizing partitions. A while ago (probably late July or early August), I needed to in order to attempt the dual-boot with Windows 8 and Ubuntu, and this "breaks" the one key recovery process by messing with the partition labels and whatnot.

My next step was looking around to solve that issue. I stumbled across this article: http://amigotechnotes.wordpress.com/2013/12/07/recover-lenovo-one-key-rescue-after-resizing-partitions/

After reading what was going on, I compared my partitions to what they should approximately be on this link (I don't know exactly what they are, if anyone has an untouched Y510P that can help with that, it would be greatly appreciated).

Here is what they were before:

Note that I only know for sure that partitions 9 and 10 are associated with Ubuntu, and partitions 1-7 are associated with Windows. I am pretty sure partitions 8 is also associated with windows. I change P1 from OEM to Recovery, P6 from Primary to Recovery, P7 from OEM to Primary, and P8 from Unknown to Recovery.

I followed all of the directions from the above link I posted and I rebooted. I still could not use the One Key Recovery.

So, I am here with a few questions, as I have been stuck on this for a while now:

1. Do I have to delete/format my Linux Partitions and resize my Windows partitions to include them in order to use One Key again?

2. If so, how can I determine what system (Windows or Ubuntu) Partition 8 belongs to?

3. If not, are there any ways to fix this problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

UPDATE: I used the Windows 8 Reset My PC option to get everything back to factory settings, so I don't have this issue anymore. Thanks for the help, though! :)

Solution

I recommend you do one of two things:

• Contact Lenovo to obtain an OEM recovery disc (or USB flash drive) for your computer.
• Obtain a retail Windows disc, as discussed here.

You should then be able to restore your system -- either to factory defaults (using the OEM disc) or to a standard "retail" installation. Either approach means that you won't have to guess about the status of any of your partitions. You could easily dig yourself into deeper trouble by making such guesses.

Comments

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