Recently my work finally got me a laptop to use, a pretty sweet. It comes with a 120Gb SSD and no optical drive which is fine, but they put recovery media on a 15Gb partition. Usually wouldn’t be a problem but with an SSD every bit of space counts so I wanted to get rid it. Problem comes in that when you go to the recovery media partition a tool loads that lets you create the recovery media on USB (don’t have a 16gb USB stick) or on DVD (no optical drive). And the kicker is you can only create it once. Hmmmmm what to do.

So, I found a tool called which lets you mount a virtual CD/DVD/BR burner on Windows. Its not like a MagicISO which let you mount ISOs you have already created, instead this effectively mounts a blank ISO which is the same as you loading a blank CD/DVD, so any program can burn to it as if it was physical media!

Lenovo x230 System Recovery Media a.k. 60 Seconds V1.0.42 on this page. a: Why physical recovery media should be mandated by law to come with any new laptop. I own a Lenovo x230. It’s a fantastic. How can I get a Product Recovery DVD or USB from Lenovo.

I only got it on the trial first which for 30 days seems to work fine. A quick install later, go into the tray icon app and create a new DVD-R sized ISO and run the Lenovo Factory Recovery Tool and get it to burn to the Phantom Drive ISO. Works like a charm! It create 1x CD and 3x DVD ISOs in my case and all I need to do was create a new ISO file each time the app ask for another blank disc. After it was finished I moved the 3x ISOs to my work desktop and was able to burn the to DVD for safe keeping and the remove the recovery partition and claim my 15Gb of SSD space back.