M1210 Hard Drive Format to Factory

Question

Hello,   I am thinking of formatting my hard drive back to factory defaults. I had originally broken up the factory partitions when I first received the laptop. The four partitions I have now are the 55mb; Vista; XP; and Recovery. I got rid of the MediaDirect from doing so.   What do I need to do now in order to bring everything back to Factory, including the MediaDirect partition?   Thanks, jzcombo

magedam · Answer

what is the OS your 1210 shipped with originally ?   If it was shipped with windows vista , you can boot from the windows vista dvd , and after loading if you got a message that says ' windows found problems with your computer's startup options do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?' choose NO  then you will get to the main menu , choose command prompt , type the following line :   path =x:/windows;x:/windows/system32 'where x is the driver letter for the recovery partition'   then press ENTER   type X: then enter type cd tools then enter type PcRestore then enter   now the restore will start   If your xps m1210 came with winxp , i guess you can boot with Ghost 12 or 11 or even 9 and locate the folder IMG on the recovery partition and ghost will do the rest.

jzcombo · Answer

My computer came with Vista installed. This process will bring back my MediaDirect Drive and everything will work properly?

magedam · Answer

no , if you want to get the Mediadirect back , you will have to go through another process , first you will have to backup all your data on your hdd , then you will have to boot using the mediaDirect 3 that came with your xps , proceed with the steps to format the hdd , make it 2 partitions , big one and another small one , for example if your hdd is 120 gb , make the primary partition 100 gb and leave the rest for the Recovery partition , after you finish , get the MD cd out and reboot . now you will have to copy your data that you backed up before again back to the drive , put all the folders that was in the recovery partition into that small partition that you just made '20 gb' , now boot with your vista cd , after the initial loading choose ' repair your computer' , and after that you cancel the repairing window , it will take you to another menu , choose command prompt , then type the commands i type before in the other post , now you should have the original package and the MD working , it will not be the exact same order as if it was new , because you already repartitioned the hdd and made it into 4 partitions , but hopefully everything will be working ok.

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