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Need Dell Windows Recovery Image for Vostro 3700
Windows 7 will not boot. My recovery USB stick will not give me the option to restore to factory settings. Diagnostics does not find any problem. So I need the Dell Windows Recovery Image to do this. But this is not available for my particular computer. Why the heck not? Have I been a naughty boy?
Now what? I have got the computer running using bootlegged stuff to make a bootable USB drive. But I'd rather be legit and actually have the computer working properly.
I was able to copy the factory.wim from the D Recovery partition to an external drive. But I have failed to find out whether I can, or how, to use it to reset my system.
jphughan
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August 30th, 2017 10:00
I think you have to boot specifically to the Recovery partition in order to restore the factory image. Sometimes that's an option under the F12 one-time boot menu, and with other systems it's triggered via a dedicated key combination (I think Shift+F11 was used once?) You can't directly recover from that image using a generic Windows 7 installer. If you're comfortable using the DISM command-line tool, however, you could PROBABLY boot into generic Windows Setup, press CTRL+F10 to call up Command Prompt, then format your current C drive, and finally use DISM to apply the image contained in the Factory.wim file to your C drive, but having never looked at the Factory.wim file I'm not sure if this would work.
ejn63
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August 30th, 2017 12:00
Control-F11 was used for the old Symantec Ghost restore (xp and earlier). You will need Windows 7 boot media to manually start the recovery.
It can be done from the command line - but you must boot the system from a flash drive or DVD.
jphughan
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August 30th, 2017 13:00
So even on systems where Dell included a separate partition and a Factory.wim file, they didn't include a WinPE environment on the partition that the user could choose to boot into? So the user's options are what, either use generic Win7 installation media with DISM to apply that file, or find custom recovery media that works directly with that file? That's lame....
ejn63
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August 30th, 2017 17:00
They did - and it's relatively fragile. Manually reinstalling or upgrading Windows -- even if leaving the recovery partition intact - destroys the quick restore boot sector.
You DO NOT need a custom boot media -- you can essentially boot just about any Windows 7 medium, drop to a command line and initiate the recovery.
You must also have imagex on the recovery media. Details here (it works for both Vista AND Windows 7).
smsoftdev-solutions.blogspot.com/.../how-to-restore-dell-factory-image-when.html
jphughan
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August 30th, 2017 17:00
I understand that you don't NEED custom boot media, but I'd have thought Dell would have it available somewhere if the built-in mechanism is so fragile, for the benefit of people who don't know how to use ImageX or its replacement DISM. The latter is built into WinPE these days and can do almost everything ImageX could do, including lay down an image in a WIM file. The only thing I'm aware of that ImageX can do that DISM still can't is edit the metadata of existing WIMs, such as changing the image name, description, or SKU flags.