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March 5th, 2016 19:00

New XPS 8900 received with OS installed on wrong drive

Just received a brand new XPS 8900 with a 256GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. For some unknown reason Dell installed their image onto the HDD (C:), leaving the SSD as a blank data drive. I'm assuming that was a mistake. Any simple way to recover short of sending the machine back to them?

24 Posts

March 7th, 2016 05:00

Sorry just noticed you mentioned it is a 256Gb SSD.  I would call support.  You can also reinstall the OS yourself.  It's not to difficult.  You can create a recovery USB from inside windows 10 or download it off the dell support site. The only tricky part is getting the bios to boot from the USB.

24 Posts

March 7th, 2016 05:00

What was the configuration?   If it had the 2TB hard drive with the 32 GB M.2 SSD, the SSD is designed as a cache, not a boot drive.   It is managed using Intel smart response technology.  There should be an icon tray to activate the configuration.

24 Posts

March 7th, 2016 05:00

Sorry just noticed you mentioning it is a 256Gb SSD.

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16K Posts

March 11th, 2016 08:00

Dell Backup and Recovery by default installs on the largest drive installed on your system. It seems like Dell seated both drives in the PC and loaded the factory image opposed to seating only the SSD, loading the HDD and then loading the factory image.

This can be amended by making a Dell Backup and Recovery USB and installing onto the SSD after using Diskpart → Clean All on the HDD. Follow the instructions here:

http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/dell-backup-and-recovery-1-8-1-71/

Alternatively clean install Windows 10 TH2.

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