Revovery of Windows 7

Instead of going through that, just set up your machine the way you want it, then create a system image of your drive using Windows 7 native backup utility.. See Brinks tutorial -=> Here

jmcd said:

Just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad SL 410 with Windows 7 Pro. Is there a way to extract Windows 7 only from the recovery partition so that I don't have to install all of the unnecessary other software.

There is a way but it is fairly complicated (at least I thought so). IIRC, the procedure for doing a clean install (of Vista but the procedure should be similar for 7) with the Lenovo recovery disks or partition was explained somewhere in this forum but you will have to search for it over there.

Btw, it is a good idea to burn yourself a set of recovery disks (assuming the machine didn't come with them) so just in case things screw up or you ever want to sell the laptop, you will still be able to get back to the pristine factory install state, even if you have nuked the recovery partition.