Reset W500 to factory state using ThinkVantage during boot?

Hello,
I'm giving my W500 to a friend so i want to wipe it completely and give it to him like its factory state.

So when i hit ThinkVantage blue button during boot i dont see an option where i can restore the laptop to factory state.

I was trying to avoid buring the DVDs on windows and do it from there as my disk in the bay tray not inside the laptop (SSD is there)

thats no longer there or what?

Also to restore things to factory it will wipe the entire disk including my second ubuntu partition? I want that too.

on the other hand for factory reset the HD need to be placed back inside the laptop not on the bay or it can be done on the bay keeping the internal SSD intact ?

Thank you

 

Spamming F11 should work if your recovery partition is still in tact. You should be given an option to wipe all partitions.

 

It'll only work if you still have the SYSTEM_DRV (contains the ThinkVantage environment, so I think you have it) and LENOVO (contains the factory image data) partitions intact. Do you have both?

 

Yes i have but not exact name, i have something similar as follows:
SERVICEV003 sized 1.5GB and has folders seems related to windows application inclding "recovery" folder
SW_Preload windows partition sized 34GB
Lenovo <-- has a folder called FactoryRecovery among many other things sized 9.8GB
and my ubuntu partition of 110GB
my disk is total 160GB

i removed the SSD from internal and placed the 160GB inside and the SSD in the tray now, even without the SSD hitting thinkvantage button doesn't show anything related to recovery, will try to reboot now and try to spam F11 and see how it goes

 

spamming F11 didn't work, it always reach the boot menu to select between ubuntu and windows

 

could it be because of ubuntu's boot loader (grub i think) its unable to detect the F11 ?

im planning to remove the ubuntu partition too, should i start with this first maybe it gets the F11 working back again?

thanks

 

i've removed thw ubuntu partition using the steps mentioned in the link above now only windows recover partitions are there, and still F11 doesn't do anything

any possibility to start the recovery from within windows without burning the DVDs and starting the process?

 

f11 probably doesn't do anything because when you installed ubuntu you overwrote the MBR of the whole disk by writing grub in there. The proper way to do it, and keep thinkvantage, is to install grub on the ubuntu partition, not on the MBR. There was an option to do that on ubuntu installer, but it's not selected by default.
The code that grub places on the MBR doesn't know and can't handle F11, so you are not going to have success this way.
Your best bet is to burn those recover dvd's, and boot the pc from there, with the disk placed on its original place.

Even then, the recovery process *may not* restore the disk MBR the way it was before - to do that you may first have to wipe the MBR completely (or even the whole disk), so then the recovery installer runs it will think that the disk is empty and reinitialize the whole thing, including the mbr.

***
A bit more details for those interested: When a pc boots, the BIOS (or the user) chooses which disk to boot from. Then the system executes whatever code is placed on the first 440bytes of that disk. This code is the boot loader, or more precisely, the stage1 boot loader. This code is responsible for loading the partition table of the disk, choosing a partition to boot from, and start executing the stage2 of the boot loader that resides on that partition. In the lenovo case, this first boot loader is custom by lenovo and is able to handle the f11 key and choose a different parition (the system_drv) to boot the ThinkVantage tools, else it boots the partition marked as 'active' or 'bootable' (which is the windows partition by default). Then the windows boot loader is run (they have their own, its the one with the options to boot in safe mode by hitting f8 etc).
Now in a normal linux install, the grub boot loader is installed, and its stage1 code overwrites the lenovo code in the first 440bytes of the disk. This code then loads up the stage2 code that resides on the linux parition: Stage2 is the grub menu that displays various options, among them one to jump back and boot the windows installation or to do a memtest86.
What I have done, to keep the lenovo stuff, is to install grub completely on the ubuntu partition. So the lenovo code runs and it boots the ubuntu partition instead, because I marked that partition as active. Then grub runs, and still offers me the option to boot windows or linux. But f11 works ;-)

 

Thanks for the detailed information i went earlier and created the CDs/DVDs and restored from them.

i will reboot in few and see if F11 is back or not.

the weird thing is when i booted into windows for the first time i used the fingerprint and it recognized my finger print!!! but gave me wrong PC name because i changed it during the initial setup.

thing is how come my fingerprint is still stored? my guess because its stored in the BOIS ?

 

Your guess is right! In the BIOS there should be an option to wipe out the stored fingerprint data...