Attempting to restore windows 7 home

Question

OK, I have a DELL inspiron n5110 laptop here which I have erased the OS partition. The OEM and restore partitions are intact. I would like to restore the factory state windows 7 home.

At boot time, I tap f8 to get to the system recovery options and enter an admin user/pass. When I get to the System Recovery Options, I believe I should see "Restore Dell something-something" - Not seeing it. I imagine this is due to installing another OS on the OS partition?

Is there anyway to make this happen via command line, or some other means? Or do I need to get a recovery DVD from Dell?

Thanks for help!

Philip_Yip · Accepted Answer

Follow the guide below for reinstall Windows 7 from scratch. It also gives download links to digital river .iso files. These require phone activation, so it is best you use the Dell DVD instead.

Tom Green · Answer

Hello TMKERR

You should get the DVD from Dell.

From what you have posted it seems like you are getting into the recovery system, after your user/pass you should see option for command prompt.

select that and run notepad click files, open, computer and see if it shows you your drive letters. At the bottom of window it might say show *.txt files,

change that to show all files. Make note of drive letters as they may be different from what you expect. Look in the recovery partition for a large file

with WIM extention. That probably is your image of the OS. If you do find it and know the drive letter OS partition, you might be able to install it manually.

The command in Win 7,

DISM /mount-wim /WimFile:driveletter:path\file.wim /index:1 /mountdir:driveletter:\

change driveletter to correct letter in both file location and destination and correct path for location of the wim file.

something like

DISM /Mount-wim /WimFile:d:\dell\image\factory.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\

If the other OS you had installed changed your BCD files you might not be able to boot. In that case you might have to install boot files. Or just run

Boot repair from the recovery.

Hope this helps.

Tom

tmkerr · Answer

Actually it's DISM /Mount-wim /WimFIle:C:\Recovery\WindowsRE\winre.wim /index:1 /mountdir:D\ same error

tmkerr · Answer

Thanks for the reply. I put in a request for a DVD, hopefully I will hear back soon.

in the meantime I may have made some progress. The .wim file was hidden, but I was able to find it using a knoppix boot cd. I entered the following:

DISM /Mount-wim /WimFIle:c:\Recovery\WindowsRE\winre.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\

I get the following error:

Error: 0xc1420131

The user attempted to mount to the root of a volume. This is unsupported.

Any ideas? There is a log file if it would help. Thanks very much.

tmkerr · Answer

Thank for those links! :) I installed windows and activated by phone.

Philip_Yip · Answer

Good :)

Windows General

Attempting to restore windows 7 home

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