TL;DR:
- Lenovo recovery media is NOT like regular Windows recovery drive. It can only factory-reset your system. No command line, no recovery from image, nothing else. Hulk smash.
- Don’t count on network to be available when you are booting from a Windows recovery drive. Keep your backups local.
I have a Lenovo laptop I bought in late 2022. Last night I decided to create a complete system backup:
Control Panel → Backup and Restore (Windows 7) → Create a System Image.
I put it on a network NAS drive that had plenty of space. The process went smoothly and in about an hour I was a happy owner of a 273GB “WindowsImageBackup” directory at the root of my NAS share.
This is all great, but how do I restore from this backup? Allegedly, the process is to create a recovery media, boot from it, and go to TroubleShoot → Advanced Options → System Image Recovery, and that should be it.
I created a recovery USB stick (minimum size is 16GB), booted from it, but I could not reach the network. Trying to activate the network would just hang.
Then I read somewhere on the Internet that Lenovo has its own specialized recovery media with better drivers. You enter a serial number, it builds the media specifically for your computer and off you go.
I went to Lenovo web site and made an “order” for the recovery media. For starters, it looks like there is no redundancy in the serial numbers, I entered my serial number wrong, and it told me that my system is probably out of service, or otherwise cannot be supported. At no point it asked me to verify the serial number.
I then noticed the mistake, entered the serial number right, downloaded the recovery media creator app, and created the recovery media.
I booted from that USB stick, but there was no familiar options to reinstall Windows, troubleshoot, command line, etc. There was just a screen with a license agreement, followed by a warning, I quote:
If you click Yes, data will be lost, and system will be recovered to your selected state
This warning, ladies and gentlemen, is a work of genius. What data will be lost? What is “my selected state”? In my naivete, I thought that I would be given an option to select the “selected state”, but no, when I clicked “yes”, it proceeded to repartition my hard drive and install a fresh copy of Windows. Data, indeed, was lost. The installation process was also somewhat weird, it created interesting directories like c:\partner, etc., and reboot probably 8 times.
When I finally had a working Windows (with all my data gone), I created another recovery drive, and tried to boot from it. No joy. I thought the drive creation process did not go well, so I recreated it, wasting another 40-ish minutes. Same result.
It turned out, that the “recovery process” not only erased my hard drive, it also turned on Secure boot, preventing booting from its own recovery drive. I also read on the Internet that the recovery process would erase not only the main hard drive, but all external hard drives on the machine, and they must be manually unplugged if you don’t want them wiped. Hulk smash!
Incidentally, Lenovo boot manager does not tell you that the secure boot is on and it can’t boot from an unsecure flash drive. It just blinks for a few seconds, and then pretends nothing happened. It’s up to the user to figure out what’s going on.
Using another computer, I copied my system image to a portable hard drive, turned the secure boot off, booted from the recovery drive, and was able to restore my system. Phew.
The good news is, that the recovery drive created from the Lenovo factory-reset Windows WAS able to reach network, but it also was flaky: one time it worked, the other time I got some undescriptive internal errors.
The bottom line is: (a) don’t trust Lenovo software and (b) keep your system backup local. The good news is, now I know that my backup actually works 🙂