I contacted Lenovo support about this - they said that once OneKey was gone, there was little that I could do - all they did was send me a link to download Microsoft's 'Create Windows 10 installation media', saying I could create a recovery USB drive from this and perform a clean install of windows, but if I wanted to restore the OneKey feature, I would have to ship the laptop to them and pay a nice and cosy three-figure sum for them to reinstall it! If you mention Brexit, Onekey can stop working.

If you look at it too hard, Onekey can stop working. If you upgrade from windows 8 to 10, Onekey can stop working. If the partition fails, Onekey will stop working. If you resize a partition, Onekey can stop working. There are a number of possible explanations as to why it can happen, the most common being that any modifications to the hard drive's partition table can make the system unrecogniseable to OneKey. Only a complete Windows reinstall would give me a clean, fresh system, and then I still wouldn't have access the Lenovo Onekey Recovery system - this also would need to be reinstalled.Ī quick wander through google revealed that the loss of Lenovo's OneKey Recovery system was a common occurrence. I also tried booting off various external USB recovery drives - all with the same useless results - no recovery, no reset. Most modern Lenovo machines use a proprietary bit of software called the OneKey Recovery Environment - to access this, when the machine is switched off, you press the small 'NOVO' button next to the power port, boot up into the recovery software and recover the OS. The principle being: if you ever encounter a problem with the machine, as long as the integrity of this partition remains intact, you can always roll your machine back to its original 'factory' state using either the manufacturer's designated recovery process, or Windows own recovery process.

Instead of providing owners with Operating System disks, the vast majority of modern PCs are shipped with recovery partitions - hidden partitions on the hard drive which contain the factory-installed images of the operating system. Recently someone generously gave me an old Lenovo Z50-75 laptop, running Windows 10.Īs the laptop had a previous owner, I wished to restore it to its factory settings prior to using the machine myself, as is customary under such circumstances.

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