Lenovo cleans up its incredibly messy Yoga 13 disk layout
From the Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due Dept.
Apparently Lenovo is listening. A few weeks ago I criticized the Lenovo Yoga 13 for a wasteful default hard disk partitioning scheme that sliced its 128 GB SSD into seven partitions and left only 42 GB of free space on the system drive.
Last week I got an update from a Lenovo representative, who said the company was releasing a fix-it tool for its customers who bought the Yoga 13:
We released a tool that will reclaim additional free space for Yoga users. It's a simple download and the process is completely automated. It doesn't reclaim quite as much space as the instructions a user posted on our forums (mostly because it does retain OneKey Recovery functionality), but it's much easier to use. Also, we're incorporating the roomier partition structure in to new production.
If you own one of these devices, you can download the hotfix here.
The FAQ has more details:
What does this tool do?
The tool adds to the size of the C drive by doing three things: First, it will merge the D drive with the C drive. Second, it will check the actual used space in the OneKey Recovery (OKR) partition, and then will resize that partition accordingly. Finally, free space recovered from the OKR partition will also be merged with the C drive.
How much space will I have?
This varies based on a number of factors, including how much data you have on your C drive, how much data you have on your D drive, and even the language of Windows 8. Typically, a US English edition of Windows 8 will have a 95-100GB C drive once the tool is complete. Note this is the total size of the C drive, not actual free space. Free space will depend entirely on how much data you already have on your system.
There are some other precautions too, especially if you did any unofficial modifications to change your partition setup.
It's a clever hardware design, and this fix takes care of a legitimate objection.
Now, about that preinstalled software...