If you are going to install Windows with the revival panel, then you don't need to reformat your main panel. The act of recovery will routinely format it for you.

Whatever he said that really makes sense. If you get well from the recovery panel you shouldn't lose the recovery partition.

If you previously shattered the current recovery partition you can get recovery disks from Lenovo support.

I don’t know from were did I hear it? That's the definition of a system recovery...

Does anyone know if the computer would still boot without the S: partition? Is that just for recovery, or also for booting? I can't wait for final 7 to come out so I can just use a Windows disc (no Lenovo partitions and crap).

The S: panel isn't needed for booting. The day Win7 RC was publicly unconfined I wiped my hard drive clean and installed Win7 (and Ubuntu 9), without the Lenovo partitions. No problems so far.

I know it's not needed for 7, but is it needed for the factory/recovery install of Vista? I can't figure out if it just keeps some backup/recovery info on it, or if Windows actually loads from S: rather than C: (again, only with the factory Vista).

When you do any kind of clean install you wipe MBR so as you no longer can enter the S: partition you might as well reformat reclaiming the space it uses.

I learned about the True image not working the hard way.

So, to make clear, as long as I am operating Vista with the Lenovo installation, I should NOT delete partition S?