I may owe you an apology about my subset #2A for making a set of recover to factory condition disks for the Lenovo. Every other notebook I've come across has this facility but from the little I've found about LeNovo laptops you can do the recovery from the section on the hard drive you mention but it doesn't include making a set of DVDs -- you buy them from Lenovo.
I've found two manuals you may like to download and keep -- too big to print --
ThinkPad T400 and R400 Service and Troubleshooting Guide
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/44c9771_a5.pdf
Especially Chapter 4. Recovery options
Note that the page numbers in the Table of Contents don't match the page numbers because of the extra pages at the beginning -- annoying but you get used to the offset
and
ThinkPad T400 and R400 Hardware Maintenance Manual
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/43y6629_05.pdf
This one is several hundred pages but the section Removing and replacing a FRU is worth its weight in gold if you ever have to go inside the computer eg to change the battery, hard drive or memory .....
It has a section beginning on page 63 (real page in the Adobe Reader) on Restoring the factory contents
Note:
Recovery takes several hours. The length of time depends on the method you use. If you use recovery discs, recovery takes at least five hours.
Somewhere I have come across a statement from Lenovo on transferring the Recovery partition from the hard drive to a thumbdrive which I will try to find since that would be the ideal solution for recovery instead of using disks.
I'm sorry about any confusion. You may want to check in the Lenovo Forums to see if you can in fact make your own Recovery disks from the hard drive partitions but be sceptic of replies since those I saw in answer to a question were pointing to the imaging of the hard drive that we touched on earlier.
PS On Sharpies -- others may correct me but I think the warning on not using solvent based pens may have applied to CDs where the sensitive coating is on the top of the disk and not the bottom whereas on DVDs it is either on the bottom or inside in a sandwich.
I've used what smell like solvent based sharpies [Permanent Marker -- quick drying] without any problems....