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.