Restore Lenovo factory MBR on x220 w/ Intel 160GB SSD? Blue Thinkvantage button/F11 no longer initiates recovery at boot.

Hello all,

Recently, I tried out a clean, UEFI install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on my x220. It was great - quick boot, minimal running processes, minimal bloatware and cheesy utilities. However, I quickly found out what others have alluded to here and elsewhere - battery life was much worse than with the factory image.

Whatever voodoo Lenovo is baking into their factory image, it is for real! The best battery life I was able to achieve was still about an hour shy of what I could pull off with the factory image during my typical day. This is all very "seat-of-the-pants" of course - I didn't break out the stopwatch - but there is a definite difference. I did install and fully update Power Manager, all the Lenovo-supplied drivers, and even the registry tweak for maximum power saving on Intel WiFi adapters.

So, with heavy heart, I decided to go back to the factory legacy boot image. Unfortunately, the extra battery life is much more important to me than any geek street cred that accompanies having a clean UEFI install. I'll just strip it down to my liking.

Like any smart Thinkpad owner, the very first thing I did when I unboxed the machine was to burn a set of recovery disks. I also performed a test restore from said disks and then performed (read carefully) a test restore from the recovery partition on the hard drive to ensure that the burned recovery disks correctly restored the factory recovery partition. OCD much?!

Anyway, I flipped the BIOS back to legacy boot, performed the restore from my recovery disks, and everything went swimmingly. All the correct partitions are there - the system_drv, Windows OS, and Lenovo recovery partition. There's just one problem - holding down the blue Thinkvantage button or F11 at boot no longer initiates the factory recovery at boot. It just sort of "thinks" for a moment and then happily goes about the business of booting into Windows.

I'm certain this is because the custom Lenovo MBR got clobbered when I switched to UEFI. What I would like to determine is if there is any way to restore the Lenovo-supplied MBR to my hard drive. I've done a fair bit of digging and I've come to the conclusion that there does not yet exist a Lenovo MBR repair utility for Windows 7 as in the past with other OS versions. Is that correct?

Does anyone know of any way to restore the Lenovo MBR? I have already intallled Rescue and Recovery but that did not work. Is there any way I could get my hands on a copy of the Lenovo factory MBR? I assume it would have to be the MBR from another x220 with the same Intel 160GB SSD due to drive geometry, partition offsets, etc, rather than from any random Windows 7 Thinkpad model/hard drive combination? Is that a fair assumption?

Heck, if someone out there could even provide just a raw backup of the this particular Lenovo factory MBR, I think I could do the rest. I suspect I could probably inject it back into the drive using 'dd' with a Linux boot disk. I know there are a few Windows freebie programs out there to backup and restore the MBR so even an MBR backup made by one of these mechanisms would probably be cool if I use the same utility to restore it..

Can anyone help?

Cheers!

 

I have seen somewhere that the restore process does not restore the Lenovo MBR if there is an MBR written to the disk.
The workaround is to make the restore wizard think the disk is brand new from the factory (so completely wiped) - so that it will have no option but to restore the MBR.
So.. Just *delete* the mbr and try again. One way of doing that that I know of is dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 from linux (or a live cd adjusting the output device etc). It should be possible in other ways too.

Disclaimer: never tried this technique, but in theory it should work.

edit: if you prefer windows software, this seems to do the trick: http://firesage.com/mbrwizard.php

 

Sadly, zeroing out the MBR from Linux before doing a factory restore from my burned recovery disks did not solve the issue.

I don't know if there is some super secret custom MBR modifications that Lenovo does via some mechanism other than the factory restore or what.

Clearly, as a result of my fiddling with UEFI/GPT, something is missing that was there before. Neither the Thinkvantage button nor F11 work at boot time to launch the recovery utility. The machine simply boots straight into Windows.

Also, pressing the Enter key at boot time no longer brings up the "Startup Interrupt Menu." The machine simply boots into Windows as above.

 

You should read through this article, then try to solve your issue by looking at what others have done.

 

I spent a fair amount of time mucking about with bmgr32 as described in that article and elsewhere. I pored over the help screen which, interestingly enough, is invoked by 'bmgr32 /nate' (apparently '/phil' works as well) and tried various things to no avail.

Shortly after, I stumbled upon this from a gentleman named Sven who seems to indicate that the latest bmgr32 (from R&R 4.3) in not compatible with Lenovo's new SYSTEM_DRV scheme.

He then goes on to describe what looks to be the equivalent of manually performing Lenovo's factory recovery and states that the Thinkvantage button's boot-time functionality would be restored. I found that not to be the case.

I wish Lenovo would release an MBR repair utility as in the past. Right now, I think my best hope is to find someone who can dump the MBR of an identical laptop out to a file.

Thanks for the suggestions all! Keep 'em coming