Hi All
First, You need to know that the following steps were tried only on Lenovo Think Pad Edge E420. and that SUCCEEDED. :)
You may try it on any Lenovo Laptop or any other Brand assuming that the vendors follow the same Procedure in using the Recovery Partition.
on your responsibility
Symptoms:
1- OEM windows 7 Crashed.
2- Laptop can't boot.
3- F11 Option which launches the Lenovo Recovery is Lost from Boot Screen.
4- As usual, you have forgotten to Burn Lenovo recovery on DVDs.
5- the Recovery partition is still healthy and present at your Hard Disk but you can,t use it.
Here is the solution:
after many trials and surfing the web for a solution, I just used my mind and said "what actually the recovery does??" most probably it just takes data from the recovery partition and transfer it again in it's original place replacing the old defected files.
So you will need the following:
1- another Win7 working Laptop.
2- SATA-USB converter.(use IDE-USB if your hard disk is IDE)
3- Some screwdriver to open your Laptop Casing and Get the Hard Disk.
4- 7-Zip installed on the working laptop
Here
Steps:
1- Open your Laptop Case (you may know the MOP by searching youtube.com )
2- Dis attach your Hard Disk and Take It OUT.
3- Connect your Hard Disk to the SATA Socket of the SATA-USB converter.
4- connect the USB socket to the other Win7 working LAPTOP.
5- see your hard disk being recognized as USB hard disk, all the drives will appear on "My Computer".
6- take a back up for all your important data.
7- open Start Menu, search for the word "Hard", you will see a result called "Create And Format Hard Disk Partitions" thanks to Microsoft, Open that tool.
8- you will see at the lower Left Part "Disc 0" that is most probably the working Laptop's Hard Disk, find your Hard Disk below that, it will be "Disk 1" if no other disks are connected to this LAPTOP.
9- look at your partitions you will find:
System ,
Lenovo Recovery , rest of the hard disk in one partition or multiple partitions if you had partitioned that.
10- the 2 partitions (
System ,
Lenovo Recovery) will be left UN touched for now.
11- for the rest of the partitions, right click, Delete Partition. And repeat that for every partition in your hard disk (Except for
System ,
Lenovo Recovery)
12- after you finish that, you will see 2 partitions, and in between an Unpartitioned space.
13- Right Click on the UN partitioned Space, select "Create Partition", follow the wizard to create NTFS Partition with all defaults, give it any name and any letter.
14- after that you will have 3 final Partitions(
System partition ,
New Primary Empty Partition, Lenovo Recovery partition)
15- Go to My Computer, You should see the 3 partitions present there, open "
Lenovo Recovery" Partition, you will see nothing :) as you have to enable "show hidden files" and dis enable "Hide System protected files" from folder options.
if you don't know how to do that , Ask me in a Comment.
16- in the recovery partition, you will see a folder called "Factory Defaults" open that and you will find some files, find in them 2 Image files with an Extension
.wmf they will be the
largest 2 files.
17- open the file starting with "Sdrive" with 7-zip, extract all the files to the Directory of your "
System" Partition replacing any old files.
18- open the file starting with "Cdrive" with 7-zip, extract all the files to the Directory of your
new Created Partition (that shall be the largest partition).
19- after finishing extracting the 2 images to the 2 partitions successfully, Go to the Last opened tool at step
7 and right click on your System Partition (careful not to select the Working laptop system partition!) and select "mark as active"
20- you are done. Eject the USB connection of your Hard disk, Install it back to your Laptop, Power on, watch it starting your OEM operating system like the first time you powered it on after purchasing.
I will try to add illustrating photos once available.
please comment if the method succeeded with you, add questions if any.
Thanks for mentioning the source if you want to copy the thread.
