How to re-enable Recovery Media creation on Lenovo T530

I had to restore a Lenovo T530 laptop running Windows 8 back to Windows 7. I tried to use the recovery media that I put on an SD card but, the laptop couldn’t boot from the SD card. So, I decided I would just recreate the recovery media using DVDs.

I went to another T530 laptop running Windows 7 to create the recovery media but, was presented with the following message:

You can have only one copy of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The Product Recovery Media Creator will exit now.

Apparently, I had already created recovery media from this machine. Setting aside the stupidity of this tactic or it’s implied meaning (creating recovery media = piracy), I needed to trick this machine into letting me do this.

A quick Google search shows just how common this problem is and fortunately a fix. Unfortunately, many of the results are for older Thinkpads that reference a file that no longer exists. Fortunately, the latest fix was found in this forum post on superuser.com.

To fix, just run this command from a CMD prompt:

echo 0 > Q:\FactoryRecovery\RECOVERY.INI:Done

After running go back into ThinkVantage Tools and retry creating recovery media – it should work.

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Fullshot tip: reassign Hotkeys

I have been using Fullshot from Inbit for years and one thing that always got under my skin was not being able to remember the hotkey combination for certain types of captures. It would be really cool if you could hover over the “SWORD” buttons to get a hint with the Hotkey but, you cannot.

However, I have found one way to remember the hotkey combination is to reassign the hotkeys to match the SWORD order for the buttons. In other words 1 = S, 2 = W, 3 = O, and so on. To change the key assignments in Fullshot go to Options > Capture Settings…

Now, all I have to do is count to the letter I want. For example, if I want to capture the Region, I count to the “R” in “SWORD” which is 4. Therefore, the hotkey combination is CTRL+4