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#1
lenovo recovery after SYSTEM_DRV wiped?
I have an old circa 2010 low end Lenovo ThinkPad that I am going to sell or donate.
Before doing that, I wanted to ensure that it contains no sensitive information. So, I decided to wipe its sole hard drive and reinstall it to factory condition using the Lenovo Recovery partition. (I assume that the Lenovo recovery tool alone is not going to do any partition wiping during restoration, but will leave file remnants behind that are recoverable.)
To do the wiping, I made a bootable GParted USB flash drive. Booting with that flash drive and running GParted revealed that my laptop's drive had 3 partitions:
- /dev/sdb1 SYSTEM_DRV (few GB?)
- /dev/sdb2 Windows7_OS (most of the drive)
- /dev/sdb3 Lenovo_Recovery (several GB at the end)
I thought that only that final Lenovo_Recovery partition needed to be preserved, so after I quit GParted, I opened the Terminal app and used the linux shred command to wipe the first 2 partitions.
Upon reboot of the laptop with the flash drive now removed, I thought that I would be able to access the Lenovo recovery program by pressing F11 during boot. No such luck: instead of getting the recovery program, the BIOS immediately printed the error "Missing Operating System".
The reason, I am now sure, is that the Lenovo recovery partition is not, in fact, sufficient: it actually depends on software in that first SYSTEM_DRV partition; I should not have erased that.
Given that I have wiped the SYSTEM_DRV partition, and I have no backup of it, is there any way forward? In particular, I assume that I need to restore the SYSTEM_DRV partition, so is there any way to do that?
If not, no biggie, this laptop will definitely be a donor in that case. But if I can easily recover it, I will.