At work, I was trying to restore a Lenovo IdeaPad Z510 back to the factory default configuration after Ubuntu Linux had been installed on it. I wanted to restore it back to the factory default Windows 8.1 scheme. I noticed that Lenovo had a “One-Key Recovery” (OKR) option, so I decided to try it. I pressed the NOVO button and chose the system recovery option. When I tried to run system recovery, it gave me this error message:
The program cannot restore the system partition because its structure is incorrect. You may have to recreate the partition to continue.
I wasn’t the one who set the laptop up originally, but I was pretty sure that since Ubuntu was installed, it had changed something about the partition layout and broken something. So I booted into an Ubuntu Live USB stick and used GParted to check it out. Sure enough, a few extra partitions had been created for ext4 and swap. It appeared that the main Windows partition had been shrunk, and the extra Linux partitions had been created in the space made available. I deleted the extra Linux partitions and resized the main Windows partition to fill up the available space.
Unfortunately, that still didn’t fix it. Maybe it would in some people’s cases, but something was still wrong with the partition layout. I started digging into the recovery partitions on the laptop’s hard drive and found a file that contained info about the partition layout. It was on the partition called PBR_DRV, and the path to it was OKRBackup\Factory\Info.ini. This file contained info about the location, size, and options for each partition.
I was able to use the information in this file, combined with the “gdisk” command while booted into an Ubuntu Live USB, to fix everything. It turned out that all of my partitions were the correct size, but the “Attributes” from this file didn’t match — several of the partitions were missing the “don’t automount” flag. I was able to use gdisk to set that flag on partitions that needed it in the expert menu. Also, for some reason, the MSR partition had been deleted, so I was able to recreate it (I created it as a new unformatted partition and set the label in GParted) and set the proper “Id” and “Type” GUID values using gdisk as well. I don’t know if Ubuntu deleted it, or if the person who installed Ubuntu manually deleted it.
For some reason, the partitions were numbered incorrectly after I did all of this, so I was able to use the “sort” function in gdisk to number the partitions properly afterward.
After I confirmed that the labels, locations, sizes, “Id”/”Type” GUIDs, and attributes all matched between Info.ini and the actual disk, I saved my changes to the partition table and tried running the system recovery. This did the trick and everything worked fine!
I didn’t write down paths or anything while I was doing this, and I had to do some Googling to find the names again, so I might be slightly off on some of the filenames. But what I described is pretty much what I did. For future reference, I did write down the following information about the partitions, in case anybody might find this useful:
- sda1: WINRE_DRV
- Start sector = 2048
- End sector = 2050047
- Size = 1000 MB
- sda2: SYSTEM_DRV
- Start sector = 2050048
- End sector = 2582527
- Size = 260 MB
- sda3: LRS_ESP
- Start sector = 2582528
- End sector = 4630527
- Size = 1000 MB
- sda4: MSR
- Start sector = 4630528
- End sector = 4892671
- Size = 128 MB
- sda5: Windows8_OS
- Start sector = 4892672
- End sector = 1874599935
- Size = 891.55 GB
- sda6: LENOVO
- Start sector = 1874599936
- End sector = 1927028735
- Size = 25 GB
- sda7: PBR_DRV
- Start sector = 1927028736
- End sector = 1953523711
- Size = 12.63 GB
