bootrec acts on usb drive rather than hdd

I am trying to recover to delivery state after having installed Ubuntu. Lenovo recovery partition was still intact, so I managed to restore the drives Windows7_OS and SYSTEM_DRV.

But first of all, the letters of the partitions get messed up after every reboot. I assign Windows7_OS the letter C, SYSTEM_DRV gets S, and Lenovo_Recovery gets Q. Diskpart then lists the drives with correct letters. After rebooting, they're back to D,C,E, respectively.
Worse, when I boot the Windows recovery disk from a usb stick, it does recognize correctly the Windows installed on drive D. But when I go to command prompt and enter

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot

then the Windows recovery disk commits suicide. It seems to attempt to fix its own bootmgr. At the moment, both usb stick and hard disk run with grub (Windows recovery on a multiboot installed via YUMI). After I run the commands above, the hard disk still runs with grub, but the usb stick now has bootmgr and fails to boot. I have tried this several times, each time recreating the Windows recovery disk with YUMI, and every time getting the same result.

Also, while the Windows recovery disk finds the Windows installed on drive D, "bootrec /scanos" gives no results.

F11 option for recovery at startup is of course gone.

Any suggestions welcome.

Why would you think Factory Recovery would run correctly after you imposed both another OS and bootloader on the HD? I've never heard of such a thing. Factory Recovery wipes the HD unless it offers an option to back up data and/or save a data partition. It has never made allowances for a foreign boot loader.

If you are a tech enthusiast who runs Linux distros then you I don't know why you would be running the intrinsically corrupt Lenovo factory preinstall with its sponsored crapware and duplicate utilities that throttle Win7. Better to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 then use the safest method to Dual Boot Ubuntu using EasyBCD.


You might also be able to use EasyBCD to add a Factory restored Win7 to Dual Boot but it's infinitely better to go completely Clean.

Yes, this is the first new Windows computer I got in 10 years, and I was a bit shocked to see how much junk came installed with it. Sadly this is not my personal computer, but from work. And our computer guy prefers the Windows delivered by Lenovo, probably because it comes with all the drivers. So the main purpose of all this is to get back the F11 option.

But I guess it would be ok if I installed a clean Windows, downloaded the drivers and software from Lenovo, and then made a backup image like you describe in your linked post. Is there any possibility to have the backup bootable, in the sense that it comes on the same usb stick as the Windows recovery disk? The X1 has no dvd drive, so otherwise the recovery option would freeze two usb sticks, one for the backup, and one for the system recovery.

Win7 is driver-complete in the installer and quickly updated via optional Windows Updates when you enable Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware. There will be very few drivers which need to be imported from the Lenovo Support Downloads webpage afterwards, and I would not change out any that are not missing in Device Manager after all Updates are done.

You can use the Win7 installer USB flash stick made from tutorial to boot to reimage your HD from a saved image on external HD.

Ok, thanks. In the end I managed to follow your tutorial. There were still some problems, like the fact that Lenovo apparently ships their laptops with 4 primary partitions preinstalled, so that a priori one can't create a new partition. And I did not have access to a Windows with administrator rights, so I had to follow this guy's advice to create a bootable Windows usb stick under Ubuntu:

Create a Windows 7 bootable USB from Ubuntu Linux » cloud101

Now everything is running fine, Ubuntu next to Windows 7.

You should have asked us about the partitioning problem as we deal with that every day here and can tell you based on a Disk Mgmt screenshot which partition to convert to Logical so you can add as many adjacent Logical partitions as you want.

To create a bootable WIn7 installer: Universal USB Installer

Ok, but in the end it's fine. I deleted the SYSTEM_DRV partition, which I guess I will not need unless I want to use Lenovo recovery, and that option is gone anyways. And I didn't try the Universal USB Installer, but I did try YUMI. And YUMI needed administrator rights, too. Anyways, thanks again for the help.