W8-created recovery disk restore back to resized system?

[alphanumeric]

I just did the factory restore from the hard drive by pressing F9 on boot up and going to Trouble Shoot > Advanced Options > Reset. It gave me the option to just reset the partition Windows was installed on or all partitions. That drive had a Data partition. I chose the partition Windows was installed to only option. It took 10 maybe 15 minutes, I didn't time it. On the next boot I got the select language screen, so it did go back to the factory state. After that I took the hard drive out and put my two SSD drives in. I then tried doing the same procedure from my USB Recovery drive and it failed. I got a "A required partition is missing" message. I then tried to restore the image I made earlier and it failed also. I got a "A drive required to restore this PC is missing". It was something like that. I wrote it down but now I can't find the paper I wrote it on. I ended up doing a clean install. That went lightning quick with no hitches.

 

[znod]

Now, this is interesting. This link was just shared on the forum with instructions as to how a W8 generated recovery drive can and should be used to reinstall the contents on the recovery drive AND to repartition the drive with a clean (OEM) install using the "reset my PC" from the USB drive. I had been getting rather unsure replies regarding this specific question. So, apparently this is the preferred method and could be why OEMs no longer provide their recovery software with the ability to burn whole system recovery DVDs. It's a Lenovo specific article, but there isn't really anything specific to Lenovo machines themselves.

Methodology to create Recovery Media and reload a Lenovo Think system with Microsoft Windows 8 preload

Interesting. You say "clean (OEM) install." Do you mean without bloatware?

 

[floepie]

Now, this is interesting. This link was just shared on the forum with instructions as to how a W8 generated recovery drive can and should be used to reinstall the contents on the recovery drive AND to repartition the drive with a clean (OEM) install using the "reset my PC" from the USB drive. I had been getting rather unsure replies regarding this specific question. So, apparently this is the preferred method and could be why OEMs no longer provide their recovery software with the ability to burn whole system recovery DVDs. It's a Lenovo specific article, but there isn't really anything specific to Lenovo machines themselves.

Methodology to create Recovery Media and reload a Lenovo Think system with Microsoft Windows 8 preload

Interesting. You say "clean (OEM) install." Do you mean without bloatware?

No, the OEM version. Installing a "clean" version is not a problem. I just wanted a surefire way to restore to the OEM system state in the case that the system partitions are re-created from scratch, as the OEM's no longer give out whole system restore DVDs and don't allow users to create whole system DVDs from their backup software.