The recovery partition on ThinkPads installs in two different sizes depending on how you install it.  If you revert to factory settings, the recovery partition should be 4-5 GB.  If you restore the system from a Rescue and Recovery backup, the recovery partition will only be about 500MB.  The down side is that Rescue and Recovery installs/upgrades write files to the recovery partition.  The 500MB partition fills up very quickly and prevents you from upgrading/installing Rescue and Recovery.  Your two options at that point are 1) research Rescue and Recovery to see if there is an install parameters that prevents files from being written to the recovery partition (in the interest of time, I have not done this), or 2) remove the recovery partition and then install Rescue and Recovery.