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Restore factory settings
I have a Inspiron 1750 with windows vista and I need to restore the factory settings. I know how to do this but, with my last laptop I restored the laptop to factory settings and was able to keep my data. I cannot remember how you do this so can anyone help me? I can't get onto my desktop to back the data up on CD's, external hardrive and so on so this is my last resort to keep my data. I have conacted dell on a number of occasions and they seem to not want to reply so this is also a last resort. Thankyou
ejn63
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October 14th, 2009 10:00
If you have a separate data partition (such as Dell Datasafe), your data -- but NOT your installed programs - will not be affected by the restore. If you don't have your data on a separate partition, it will be overwritten in a restore.
If that's the case, you can recover your data prior to restoring by a couple of means:
remove the hard drive, mount it in an external case, and attach it to a working system by USB to copy your data, or
Use a bootable Windows CD (made with BartPE or similar or a Linux (knoppix) CD to recover your data to a flash or external hard drive.
kezabela
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October 14th, 2009 12:00
Thanks for the response but it doesnt make much sense to me. What i do get from it though is it seems a long and higly unlikely thing for me to be able to do. As for the data partition, I heard about that but that isn't the case with me. With my last laptop, it was a standard inspiron 1525 windows vista and i followed the f8 rule to restore factory settings but, i think it was a command prompt job instead of restore factory image. Never mind, I'll just hope for a response from dell sometime soon. Thanks again