S210 Touch Windows USB Recovery Drive does not boot

Question

I have an S210 Touch and I am looking to swap out the existing hard drive for an SSD.  Looking to do this in a "sanctioned" way from the discussion forums i.e. create a recovery USB drive WITH the Recovery Partition and boot from it - this would be the same use case if the hard drive crashed and I want to recover to a blank replacement drive:
  http://lnv.gy/Y0hlMU
which is similar to this set of official instructions:
  http://support.lenovo.com/en/documents/ht076024
There are also other official posts on creating the recovery USB drive, and pressing F12 at POST to boot from the USB drive.  In the BIOS, Secure Boot is turned off and the Optimization (last tab) is set to Others.
When I try to boot from the Wndows Recovery USB drive, however, the USB drive would start, then the Lenovo logo would come on, and the process repeats itself until I pull the plug F12 does NOT work.  Apparently, this symptom has been experienced by others looking to install Unbuntu, though it is happening WITH the Windows RECOVERY DRIVE.
Is there something inherently wrong with the S210 Touch that it won't boot the Windows Recovery Drive?
Being curious, I also tried a DOS (Win98) - formatted USB drive, and for some reason, IT BOOTS!!!
Some more sanity checks (Secure Boot is OFF, Optimization is Other): 
1.  Created a recovery drive from a working Window 8.1 machine (Retail version installed on a Dell) and attempted to boot.  This time, F12 does bring up the boot screen, but USB is NOT a choice to boot from.
2.  Created a recovery drive from the S210 WITHOUT the Recovery Partition - the USB Boot - Lenovo Logo cycle goes on.  Perhaps there's a problem with the preinstalled copy of Windows on ALL (!!!) S210 Touch machines???

Answer 1

Long story short, I finally moved my Windows 8 installation to an SSD using a 3rd party product's boot CD to back up the factory hard disk to an external USB hard disk, swapped in the SSD, tthen restoring it to the SSD.  Futzed around with moving / reducing / deleting unnecessary partitions so my windows partition is maximized.
Trying to get OneKey Recovery to work would be an academic exercise (in futility) as the recovery and image partitions take up valuable space on the SSD and I now have an offline backup / restore method.  Now the laptop is running MUCH FASTER (8 seconds to Metro Screen) and much cooler.  Now it's upgrading to Windows 8.1
The takeaways from this misadventure:
1.  Booting with USB Flash Drives simply DOES NOT WORK, and I cannot tell whether the fault lies with with system tools (Microsoft) or the UEFI Firmware (Lenovo) or BOTH.  I was lucky to have a USB hard drive and DVD around.
2.  Dropping support from CD/DVD Recovery Disc creation from Windows 8.1 is simply taking scissors to a safety net given that booting from USB Flash Drives DO NOT WORK consistently across all hardware, especially ones running UEFI Firmware.
3.  OKR is nice to have, but not mission criditical if the disk space is limited, especially if alternatives exist.
4.  Windows native tools for backup and restore DO NOT WORK with this particular Lenovo model and its UEFI Firmware.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't work others from Lenovo or other major brands.  Value Added tools like OKR do not restore on Bare Metal.
5.  SSDs absolutely ROCK, and the trade-off between speed and storage is well worth it, especially now that storage can be offloaded on to NASs or the cloud.  No mechanical storage issues to worry about (had 2 drives crash within the last month, each dying just after the 2-year warranty expired), runs much cooler, and it's a no brainer - 120GB drives can be found on sale for $60-$70, the crappiest of them will still run many times faster than traditional hard drives.
Bottom Line:  things that SHOULD WORK often DON'T WORK.