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What is on a dell harddrive?
Hi, I just had to format my hard drive after a complete fail of vista. Anyway I've got vista reinstalled but I no longer have my recovery partition and I want to recreate. How would I do this?
And also I remember that along side my recovery partition and my primary partition for vista I had two other partitions, one was an EISA i think and I can't remember what the other was? Does anyone know what they were and how I go about recreating them?
Basically what I want to do is restore my laptop back to the way it was when it left the factory, with all the partitions and such the same, but I have no idea how to go about this, any help will be greatly appreciated
Please Please help!!
BSC_Engineering
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May 19th, 2009 16:00
The only partition shown when I go in is My C: partition. When I reinstalled I think I formatted the whole disk, even though I selected only the volume in diskpart. The reason I had to reinstall was because the boot record was damaged. It might still be there like you say because I have 250gb hardrive and in total I only have 230gb.
Is there no way to rewrite the master boot record or rebuild the hardrive to dell configuration myself? so I can get it back to the way it was
BSC_Engineering
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May 19th, 2009 16:00
Yea, Ive been viewing them through disk management
Davet50
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May 19th, 2009 16:00
the partitions are still there did you go to the my computer icon and right click on it and select manage. In the management window select Disk management.
This will show you your drives and all the partiions
The ESIA partition cannot be deleted without some special steps that require software and such. So that will still be there. The main parttion or C will be there, The recovery partition will be there, assuming you did not repartition the disk during the reinstall, but since you have altered the master boot record it is now unusable. There is no way to recover this. The fourth partition if it was there would be the media direct partition so unless you had media direct there will be no fourth partition .
ejn63
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May 19th, 2009 16:00
You can restore things, but it's not a trivial exercise. The Vista image is made with ImageX, which you can download from Microsoft - it's not a particularly user-friendly tool, though - - it runs at the command line.
On most newer systems you can prepare a CD or DVD of the Dell diagnostics by downloading an ISO file - it's not necessary to have it on the hard drive. For that matter, it's really not all that useful to have the quick restore on the drive either - it's far better to have the image on an external drive. A common need for restore is a drive failure, and if the drive dies, and the restore is on it, your restore goes with the failed drive. Purchase an external drive and a copy of Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost and you'll be prepared for a drive failure - boot the system from the CD you prepare from the utility and you can be back up and running very quickly.
BSC_Engineering
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May 20th, 2009 10:00
Thanks, Im actually on that page at the mo, I think this will sort me out! Thanks for the help
ejn63
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May 20th, 2009 10:00
Here you go:
http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/index.htm
BSC_Engineering
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May 20th, 2009 10:00
I think I will take your advice on the image on the external drive. But I still would like to know how I go about recovering my EISA partition, or even recreating one, as I feel it would be useful to have