Wednesday January 27
 
14:40
 
Lenovo one key recovery – how to fix it

Before I bought my Acer netbook, I bought a Lenovo netbook.

Right from the beginning, I got disk error. I decided wipe the C drive and install Windows 7 over the Japanese OS. It worked OK, but the initial disk errors bothered me, so I decided to restore the laptop to original state and return it. And there I hit a problem. Windows 7 had repartitioned the disk and one key recovery (OKR) no longer worked.

Eventually after a day of investigating, I did finally manage to get OKR to work again, restore the netbook to original state, and return it for a refund. So that time isn’t wasted, I’m going to post what I found out about OKR – because after searching around, I know lots of people are having issues with it.

Switched off, the OKR button is supposed to boot you to recovery mode to restore the hard drive. But if anything alters the partition information of the HDD, it stops working – instead it boot you into Windows.

The reason for this is that the recovery partition is special – it has a #12 partition ID, which is a Compay Configuration/Diagnostics Partition (details here). Most partitioning software doesn’t know about this partition ID and when you change partition information, such as by adjusting partition sizes or creating a new partition, that ID gets reset to something the partitioning software knows about. That stops the OKR key working.

To restore the ID, you need gparted on a USB key or on CD. Search Google and you can get it easily enough. Method:

1. Boot into gparted.
2. Identify the disk identifier for the recovery partition – eg /dev/sda4
3. Open up the gparted console
4. Type fdisk /dev/sda (ie. take the number off the identifier)
5. Type m for help if you want
6. Type p to print the partition table – check you get the same number as above
7. Type t, then 4 for the partition number (replace with the number of your partition)
8. If you want, type L to list codes
9. The code you want is 12, enter 12 and then type w to write
10. Do not use the GUI from this point – if you do, it will remove the code 12
11. Exit gparted and try the OKR button. It should work.

An alternative is to set the boot flag on the recovery partition. The lenovo will then boot using the recovery partition.