Fun with OneKey Recovery on a Lenovo G550

I purchased a nifty Lenovo G550 laptop at Office Depot for $399 a couple weeks ago. Great machine at an astonishing price point.

Of course I immediately created factory default recovery disks (two DVD-R disks) so I could always return to as new including Windows 7 Home Premium etc. This worked fine.

Tonight I went to create a second set of factory default recovery disks -- I had given my original set to my Grandpa Bob who picked up an identical G550 for same great price -- and immediately encountered a road block as the OneKey Recovery 7.0 program was unable to find the service partition. The service partition on a Lenovo G550 is an ~15 GB hidden partition that has the ~8 GB factory image on it. Hmmmm...

Somehow my "hidden" service partition had become unhidden and was sitting in Windows Explorer as the O: drive with label LENOVO_PART. After an hour or so of googling around and noticing a few other hapless souls were in my same predicament, I hit upon the expedient solution and then afterwards realized what had happened.

The solution is to (carefully) use the windows command line diskpart.exe utility to toggle the service partition's ID back to 12 (a hidden OEM code) from the errant ID 7 (visible normal code). After doing so, partition dissapears from explorer and OneKey Recovery 7.0 finds it normally and can make factory recovery disks.

After correcting the issue, I ran OneKey Recovery 7.0 while keeping an eye on an open Windows Explorer. Sure enough, when you ask OneKey to create a factory restore disk, it momentarily toggles the service partition's ID to visible (7) and then toggles it hidden again as you click through the factory disks wizard. At some point during my original use of OneKey, it must have died (or I killed it) mid stream and before it set the partition back to OEM hidden (12). I suspect this is a bug in OneKey.