How to exercise the Recovery Partition?

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 14:34:46 -0800, "Timothy Daniels"
wrote:

Here are the directions for my XPS M1330 laptop:

Dell Factory Image Restore
1. Restart the computer.
2. As the computer restarts, press F8 until the Advanced Boot Options
menu appears on the screen.
3. Press Down Arrow to select Repair Your Computer, then press Enter.
4. Specify the language settings you want, then click Next.
5. Log in as a user with Administrative credentials, then click OK
6. Click Dell Factory Image Restore.
7. In the Dell Factory Image Restore window click Next.
8. Select Yes, reformat hard drive and restore system software to
Factory Condition checkbox.
9. Click Next. The computer is restored to the default facotry configuration.
10. When the restore operation is completed, click Finish to restart the
computer.

If you look hard enough, you should be able to find the .pdf of the
Owner's Manual for your computer on the Dell website. It's in the
Support section.

*TimDaniels*



"Mike Marquis" wrote in message
...
Thanks William. F12 brings up the boot-order menu. No Recovery partition on
it.

Mike


"William R. Walsh" wrote in message
...
Try the F12 key when the power on self tests are running. It used to
bring up a whole list of things the computer could boot to. If the
recovery partition is valid, it should show up.

William



With all due respect I just did this and it's not the same.
It is NOT identical to the way it was when I bought it in June.
Now the damn printer won't work so I had to get a new one.
My dial up speeds fell like a ton of brick. My normal speed was around
50, the other day it hooked up at 4.8. My best speed now is 45 and
nothing else changed.
And I'm about ready to take a HAMMER to this posessed machine.
It's a Dell Inspiron 530 with Winxp office. When I first got the
machine it would run my old HP 600c printer, not anymore.
I have owned 2 others without problems.
I wish I had never bought this one. :'(....

"Robert McMillan" wrote in message
...

"S.Lewis" wrote in message
...

"Tom Scales" wrote in message
news:000101c97041$269b8000$7301a8c0@SFF...
Well, yes, but that's for XP. Didn't realize it was Vista. SHOULD
still work.



For Vista he may have to do F8 instead, which will give him a WinVista
GUI with repair/restore choices - or should.

I think Vista killed the CTL+F11 hotkey combo that was used for XP.

Should be still there, I did it for a friends Inspiron 530 Desktop
recently and it has Vista installed.


Gracias. I intentionally killed the partitions on my XPS420, and haven't
image restored a Dell Vista machine to this point......

Would've sworn they'd changed it to F8.

"Timothy Daniels" wrote in message
m...
Here are the directions for my XPS M1330 laptop:

Dell Factory Image Restore
1. Restart the computer.
2. As the computer restarts, press F8 until the Advanced Boot Options
menu appears on the screen.
3. Press Down Arrow to select Repair Your Computer, then press Enter.
4. Specify the language settings you want, then click Next.
5. Log in as a user with Administrative credentials, then click OK
6. Click Dell Factory Image Restore.
7. In the Dell Factory Image Restore window click Next.
8. Select Yes, reformat hard drive and restore system software to
Factory Condition checkbox.
9. Click Next. The computer is restored to the default facotry
configuration.
10. When the restore operation is completed, click Finish to restart the
computer.

If you look hard enough, you should be able to find the .pdf of the
Owner's Manual for your computer on the Dell website. It's in the
Support section.

*TimDaniels*



That's pretty much the way I remembered it, Tim. Thanks.

FYI for all those who responded to my original post:

I did try F8 and got an opportunity to select Repair Windows (they also had
a lot of other options that I don't recall except that NONE referenced
restoring the original image or similar wording). I tried that and got a
Loading Files crawl bar along the bottom for a couple of minutes and then a
barebones Windows GUI. I followed all the reasonable prompts and then a CMD
window opended and a bunch of scripts started to run off x:\. All scripts
failed with an Error 700. Eventually it booted back into the standard
Windows with nothing apparently changed. At this point I punted and dragged
out The Vista DVD and began the hour long journey of installing from scratch
(after deleting the useless Recovery Partition) and loading proper drivers
and updates.

Prior to this I did a normal Windows boot and surfed over to D: and found a
Restore (I think) app under Tools. I fired it up and it said it couldn't
find the "disk image".

Mike


"S.Lewis" wrote in message
...

"Tom Scales" wrote in message
news:000101c97041$269b8000$7301a8c0@SFF...
Well, yes, but that's for XP. Didn't realize it was Vista. SHOULD
still work.



For Vista he may have to do F8 instead, which will give him a WinVista GUI
with repair/restore choices - or should.

I think Vista killed the CTL+F11 hotkey combo that was used for XP.

"Mike Marquis" wrote in message
...
FYI for all those who responded to my original post:

I did try F8 and got an opportunity to select Repair Windows (they also
had a lot of other options that I don't recall except that NONE referenced
restoring the original image or similar wording). I tried that and got a
Loading Files crawl bar along the bottom for a couple of minutes and then
a barebones Windows GUI. I followed all the reasonable prompts and then a
CMD window opended and a bunch of scripts started to run off x:\. All
scripts failed with an Error 700. Eventually it booted back into the
standard Windows with nothing apparently changed. At this point I punted
and dragged out The Vista DVD and began the hour long journey of
installing from scratch (after deleting the useless Recovery Partition)
and loading proper drivers and updates.

Prior to this I did a normal Windows boot and surfed over to D: and found
a Restore (I think) app under Tools. I fired it up and it said it couldn't
find the "disk image".

Mike


Yes because you deleted the partition should have done what Tom said Ctrl +
F11