copying backup partition to external disk

Hey all, and merry christmas,

I love my new T42

I bought an external hard drive and want to reclaim eth 10GB of space that the recovery partition takes up. I already burned my recovery CDs, and now i want to simply copy the hidden partition (or move it) to my external disk, and free up that space. How do I go about this? I cant even see the partition on normal boot.

 

You have to go into the BIOS and turn it off so you can see it.

 

I have to turn something off to view the partition? ill try looking in teh bios when i get home - that sounds kind of odd though.

i assume that the partition is bieng hidden somehow. If I unhide it, I probably will have to mount it as an extra partition , correct? (unless there some easy way to merge the free space on that partition into the main one?). I prefer a single big C: drive rather than a big C and a smaller D.

 

UPDATE: OK, I went into the Recovery bootup OS (what IBM calls the Predesktop Environment) and was pretty impressed. I think I'm keeping this thing. It's an entire OS, looks like ultramodified Windows, with full USB support and even internet connectivity (no support for wireless, ethernet only). I can live with the 5 GB of space it occupies (to save some space, I deleted the i386 folder on the regular partition instead, after copying it to my external 250GB disk).

Its pretty impressive. The web browser is Opera too

What I do intend to do is optimze the PC more, however. I need to go through the services and see which ones i definitely dont need, look through the software and uninstall any useless apps (there dont seem to be that many though), etc. The recommended software thread was pretty handy, I will prolly install ccleaner and tune up the registry.

Once Ive got all that done, I'll create a system restore point, backup the whole disk to my external, and then go forth in happiness.

Its funny, you always hear Apple people constantly talking about how the hardware isnt teh selling point, its the software and general usability. I think IBM could easily make teh same argument. This is an impressive machine, not just the hardware, but all aspects of the config.

 

The software that IBM developed is awesome. Theres loads of optimization you can do in the BIOS too. Does/Did the Microsoft System restore ever worked for you. I have used it several time on several different machines and it takes a lot of time and finally returns an error stating that no change has been made. Its totally useless as far as I am concerned and I would recommend using the IBM Backup & Restore utility to backup once you have done all tweaking you want.

Where is the recommended software thread??

cheers