Need to recreate partitions of Lenovo W520

Question

I recently bought a Lenovo W520 and upgraded it with a SSD drive I bought from somewhere else. I imaged the drive so everything is good. The problem came when I formatted the original drive to use as a secondary hard drive. I messed some things up, so I want to restore the original drive (which is backed up in a Windows Home Server).

The original computer came with 3 partitions: SYSTEM_DRV, Windows Instal, Lenovo_Recovery. To make a long story short, I need my orginal drive to contain the 3 partitions and I will then restore the data from the WHS. Here are the details for each partition:

SYSTEM_DRV: 1200MB, System, Active, Primary Partition Windows 7: Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition Lenovo_Recovery: 16000MB (don't know the flags).

Which program should I use? Would diskpart do it? If you don't mind I would love to get step by step instructions on how to do it.

Answer 1

Assuming you're using Windows 7, if the drive is not your primary hard drive, you can create/delete partitions from within Windows.

1. Backup all your valuable information!
2. In the start menu search box type: Create and format hard disk partitions. Hit enter. The Disk Management MMC will open.
3. Find the drive you want to edit.
4. Depending on the current state of the drive, it may or may not have any partitions. If there are any, delete them all.
5. Right click on the the empty drive and click New Simple Volume. Here you can enter the size etc.
6. Repeat step 5 for all your partitions.

You can also use the GParted live cd if Windows cannot create the partitions for you.

More Info:

1. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition

Answer 2

Since this is very specific to Lenovo I ended up getting the answer from their forums. You can find it in this forum, answered by phil5 on 5/31/2011