Rescue and Recovery Disks vs. Restore from external HD?

Can someone please explain this to me:

If one has to use the recovery and restore feature on the Thinkpad (say T60) and because the service partition is messed up and the drive probably needs to be reformatted, shouldn't a restore from an external hard drive of a previously saved backup reformat the entire drive and work? In my case it stops at 20%.

Does the recovery DISKS that they are sending do something more thorough such as a full HD reformat and repartition that restoring from one of my backups from my external HD doesn't?

I guess at the end of the day they'll send me a new Hard Drive if I need but I'd love to know if I can expect to have use of my laptop sooner than later. If they did send me a replacement HD I am not even sure how easy it is to replace that? Is it at simple as removing the screws on the drive bay and unplugging the old one and plugging in the new one?

Thanks,
S

 

Whenever you upgrade a version of RnR and change versions (currently ver 4), you must also rebuild the rescue media at the same time (Create recovery media), as that will update the copy of Windows PE on your bootable drive....Did you do that?

 

The hard drive is very easy to replace. And the recovery media will recreate the perfect factory image...

 

Thanks for the reply John. Well I haven't received the disks just yet, once they arrive I assume it will reformat the entire hard drive. I didn't realize it also replaces the hidden recovery partition as you mentioned, for some reason I feel like the tech said that it does not. I don't know what version of RnR they will send, I hope it is 4, strangely my new T60 computer (before it got corrupted) was RnR version 3. Once I do all this I will run PC Doctor and HD Tune to make sure there are no bad sectors and that what caused the corruption in the first place has not damaged the drive, otherwise I will ask for a new one since it is their Thinkvantage Security Solutions which crashed while creating a Private Security disk and messed everything up.

To answer your question no I did not make recovery media on disks, is this something I should do even though they would have sent me recovery disks? Is the recovery media I would create more specific to what is on loaded on my computer?

 

the same thing has happened to me mate, im waiting for lenovo to send me the product recovery supplemental discs..

 

So the client security solutions tried to partition private disk and the program hung until you had power down? Or what exactly happened in your case? It's a nuisance, not being able to use your new system, I wish they would just charge us the extra cash and send us all disks right off the bat when we purchase the systems. Hopefully they come soon. My only concern is I want to make sure the HD didn't get bad sectors after it froze up, I did a diagnostic through bios and it passed, but I don't think it will tell me if there was bad sectors or damage in detail like HD Tune.