Restoring to factory settings my ThinkPad P51

[Corobori]

I want to perform a restore to the factory settings of my ThinkPad P51.

When pressing the F11 key I am seeing the text "Loading Recovery....." but it always ends up firing Windows. Any idea why? Or if there is an alternative way? I read about the Lenovo OneKey feature but it doesn't seem to be available on my Thinkpad and neither is the NOVO button I also read about.

 

[Darkbreeze]

By "factory settings" what are you talking about?

Do you mean in regard to the Windows installation or the BIOS configuration?

If you're talking about Windows, then you probably DO NOT want to restore the system to "factory settings". What you REALLY want to do is a clean install. The reason being, practically every prebuilt desktop system or laptop that ever ended up in a consumers hands, with very few exceptions, came preloaded with tons of unnecessary and often undesirable garbage. Much like, in fact, exactly like, preinstalled viruses or malware when you really get down to the nitty gritty of what these OEMs installed after Windows was installed. Useless tools and utilities. Applications designed to do nothing more than "phone home" with your personal information, even worse than Windows itself. Software with no real tangible benefit that nonetheless used high system resources.

Nope. I would keep the installation of ANYTHING other than Windows itself, that comes from the OEM (In your case, Lenovo), to only what is absolutely required and for some laptops it IS sometimes required to install some OEM specific software in order to gain full driver or BIOS updateability on some laptops, but I'd do everything I could to NOT have to install any of that crap first. Most of the time none of it is necessary at all because most OEMs offer full driver support via download from their websites for anything that Windows doesn't natively have support for OR in many cases even better full featured driver support without having to install any of their crapware, for integrated components even if Windows DOES have native support for it. Since some Windows hardware support is not full featured and only intended to offer basic usage of some devices, it's usually a good idea to look for those device specific hardware drivers on the OEMs website after you've installed Windows, or even better, BEFORE you've installed Windows, so you already have them on a flash drive or whatever, ready to go once Windows is clean installed.

Explicit instructions on installing Windows 11, a CLEAN install, can be found here:

Clean Install Windows 11 Tutorial

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[Corobori]

By "factory settings" what are you talking about?
Do you mean in regard to the Windows installation or the BIOS configuration?

What I mean is having my notebook back as when I got it first: with a clean Windows and nothing more. Ideally only wiping out only my C drive, and leave the D and E drives as they are I will reinstall all the programs I am using, Windows 10 by the way. Lenovo says that by pressing F11 repeatedly, when the LENOVO logo appears, I will be given a choice but I just saw the message "Launching recovery utility" flicker, and then Windows comes up.

So far what I did is create a Recovery Media from Lenovo Website and backup my complete disk to an external drive.

I then went to Settings > Recovery > Reset My PC was given some choices, see print screen below, but I am not sure that clicking on the Confirm button is the way to go

 

[BFG-9000]

A restore partition is practically useless, because the Windows build it contains is dated and does not get updated when the Windows build does.

For example if your laptop from 2017 came with Windows 10 1709, then it is not going to be able to reset later builds of Windows 10 such as the current 22H2. The only thing you can do with it is select Reinstall Windows from this device and then you will see 1709 again, which is unable to update itself any longer because it's too old.

So unless your laptop came with some preinstalled software you'd like to keep, it makes much more sense to just use the media creation tool to make a current USB Windows install media. If you would like to keep the preinstalled bloatware, restore 1709 and then run the 22H2 install media from the desktop of Windows 1709 to manually upgrade it to the current build.

A clean install should not touch drives D and E provided they are partitions on the same disk as C. If they are on a separate disk then it is suggested to disconnect it before install, or the installer may decide to put a boot partition on it and then the system won't be bootable without it.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, a clean install is still what you want to do. As BFG clarified, and it was a very good point, any "factory" or "Restore" partitions will be highly out of date even if the machine is only like six months to a year old, but especially if it's more than that. You want your installation to be as fully up to date as possible for a couple of reasons. One, because having all the included fixes and patches being an integral part of the initial installation results in a cleaner OS install than having to go back and add those updates in piecemeal later and two, because having to do that later is also unnecessarily time consuming and can sometimes result in undesirable conditions. Doing a clean install using the latest OS image is ALWAYS the much preferred method.

Also, as noted by BFG, be very aware that in most of the clean install guides it is recommended to delete ALL existing partitions on the target drive for Windows BUT if this is a laptop with only a single drive and you have non-OS related partitions on that drive with important data on them you will want to be sure to NOT delete the partitions that contain that information. Conversely, on desktop systems we generally recommend not putting other partitions on the same drive as the OS and disconnecting secondary drives during the removal of the existing partitions on the OS drive and installation of the OS, then reconnecting them afterwards, so that there is no chance of accidentally deleting the information on those secondary drives AND so that there is no chance of Windows accidentally (Potentially, and you'd be surprised how often this happens) seeing a hidden EFI/Boot partition from a secondary drive that USED to be a primary drive with Windows on it, and using that rather than creating a new one on the primary OS drive which really makes things interesting later.

For you on a laptop, it's becoming more common to see multiple storage device capability on them but it's still not super common as it is with desktop systems. In any case, during the clean install I recommend you be sure to choose the "Custom" option when you get to that point and then in the list of partitions you delete the existing C: (Windows) partition, the EFI/Boot partition (Normally hidden except in Windows installer or partition management applications) and the factory/restore partition, and then proceed to select either the then unpartitioned drive or whatever unpartitioned space is remaining on the drive if there are other partitions remaining on it after removing those partitions, and install to that.

 

[Corobori]

Hi,

One week after the reinstall I am pretty happy with the result. My Thinkpad P51 is back to its old self and ran fast again. I guess the installation I made since I got it, more than 3 years ago, took its toll: I had 3 different SQL Server versions, 2 SQL Management Studio, 2 Visual Studio, 10+ DevExpress components versions, and the list goes on.

Here are the steps I took:

1) I created a Recovery Media from Lenovo website here and stored it in a pendrive

2) Using MiniTool Partition Wizard I backed up my disk onto a brand new external drive. It took about 1h50 to save my 1Tb SSD to my external drive

3) I disconnected the external drive

4) After some fiddling around in the BIOS I eventually managed to make the notebook restart using the pen drive. The F12 allowing to choose the boot drive didn't work then, this has been fixed since, but I don't know why.

5) Reinstalling the OS went very smoothly, in about 3 hours I had it up and running including all Windows Updates. That was it for the first day.

6) The following day I copied back the data from my backup disk took more time than I expected but at this stage, I went out gardening while it happened.

7) Then it took a few more hours to reinstall all my tools such as SQL Server, SQL Management Studio, and Visual Studio.

Some issues:

- Remote Desktop Connection: password issue I had saved the connections I was using under .rdp files and as I had used them prior to reinstalling I know they were working. Strange enough when I wanted to use them after they asked me for users and passwords as somehow the OS detected the machine change.

- Sticky Note: if you're using them you might want to back up the plum.sqlite file located in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes. I got back mine with my OneDrive login

- SOS Backup: One of my backup systems is SOS Backup, when I reinstalled my machine I thought it cool to change its name. Not a wise move, as it was under a different name SOS Backup consider it as a new machine and started to back up all my selected folders again therefore I almost ran out of disk space on their server. Solution: I renamed my machine back to its old name and cleaned up what had been copied. Side effect from that renaming process: the SQL Server I had installed running under the new name: I didn't want to take any chance so I uninstalled it completely and reinstall it again with the new/old name.

- MiniTool Partition Wizard: license issue, as I had a license covering one year of updates I had to search for a backup of the installation file according to my license because their support told me "We no longer have the download link to the old version you purchased as it has been discontinued for a long time"

- SQL Server Management Studio. I got back the annoying beep sound while working on it. It can be disabled by going to the menu, Tools > Options > Query Results > SQL Server > General, and unchecking the “Play the Windows default beep…” option. And also under the Analysis Server

- Fonts: I had forgotten to copy my fonts, got them back from my saved C: drive

- Visual Studio: I am using that tool for my work and when reinstalling it they are 2 options that are coming as a defect that required action: one was to run the setup again and check the option ".NET Framework project templates, item templates" because some templates were missing and the other was the new Web Live Preview designer that was messing up with DevExpress components, I had to go in Tools > Options > Web Forms Designer, select the "Legacy Web Forms Designer" Options

- ApexSQL SQL Diff: this is still an ongoing issue. I have purchased a "perpetual license" of the product but it seems that despite being perpetual I can't reinstall it as I am getting an "Invalid activation code" message. I contacted their support but they don't seem willing to help as the support and upgrades contract expired in January 2020. They are saying "While the license is indeed perpetual and you own it / can use it, technical support is available while the license is under maintenance. "
UPDATE: Eventually I had it working, and support put me on the right track, instead of using the Automatic activation process I used the manual activation process, bingo !

- Firefox: this is the most serious issue I am having, I have lost all my passwords that I was using in both Firefox versions I had, the developer edition and the standard one. The reason? I didn't remember my Firefox Account password and had to reset it and I have been told that "Resetting the password for the Firefox Account because you do not remember the password will remove all data stored on the Sync server because this password is used to encrypt your data before it is uploaded to the Sync server and only this password or a possible recovery key can decrypt this data." I managed to switch on my previous machine where I managed to backup the passwords I was using up to 2019 in a CSV file, and got to rescue one I really needed

- Speed Dial 2: I forgot to export my settings and therefore lost them. I got them back again using my previous machine but as it was a different format I had to tweak the JSON file and reload that one.

- Reinstalling GoodSync went smoothly as I had backed up all the jobs before, and the licensing process went fine as their website allows to disconnect/reconnect software.

- I am using TheBat! as email software. reconnecting to the folders where data went smoothly. But anyway, next time I will perform a complete backup before thru the software, just in case.

- Whatsapp reconnected fine including historical conversations.

- Docking station. The loudspeaker jack on the back of my docking station didn't seem to work anymore as no sound was coming from the speakers when connecting them thru the docking, but were working fine when connecting thru the notebook. I had to go thru the Lenovo website and install a driver.

One piece of advice: if you need to reinstall software requiring license numbers try to save them in a text file before going thru the whole process. Mine were stored in my email client software and before accessing them I had to restore the data and the software. And as the data restore was done thru a tool requiring the license key I got almost trapped in catch 22 situation, luckily MiniTool Partition Wizard free version allowed me to perform the task without a license key

Thanks guys for the advice I got, I hope sharing my experience will help people avoid hitting some snags in the process.

Again I am very happy with my reinstallation process, it is a bit scary at some stage but with a proper backup, nothing should be lost in the process. And I got a speedy notebook again. I just hope to be able to sort out the ApexSQL SQL Diff issue as they are now selling it at a price beyond what I am willing to pay.