… there is, perhaps, another solution where you would not have to purchase the disks from Lenovo:
If you know of anyone who has a Lenovo laptop that shipped with the same version of Windows as your friend’s laptop was shipped with, you can clone the Recovery partition from that laptop. It does not need to be the same model.
It will work and will actually be legitimate, since it is the vendor’s system-wide mass license. It will license itself properly according to the laptop you are recovering it to.
So, if you are so lucky:
Check the layout of the drive you are cloning from. You do not need to create any of the other partitions, but you want to make certain you have the same type of Partition Table (msdos or gpt). Then, check the position of the Recovery partition on that machine. You want to place it in the same location when you restore it to your friend’s laptop; that is, if it is at the end of the drive on the source laptop, you want to place it at the end of the drive on the target laptop, and if it is near the front, make certain you restore it to the same position (starting sector) as it was on the source laptop.
To do that, first make a partition image of the Recovery partition only. Then, create an empty partition the same size in the same location on the target laptop. Recover the partition image to that empty partition.
From that point, you would simply follow the instructions for “Restoring from Recovery Partition” (or similar wording).
If the source laptop is exactly the same model, then you are done. If it is not the same model, you probably have a bit of work ahead of you, a little time consuming, but not difficult.
In the latter case, you will now have to go back to the support site for your friend’s laptop and download all the software and drivers they have available for that machine. Everything you need will be there.
Then, you will need to install all of the downloaded software and drivers on your friend’s laptop, after which you will be done with your recovery.
Good luck, I will keep watching this thread.