Dell Factory Image Restore after repartitioning a hard drive?

Question

Hi everybody. I own a Dell Studio 1537 laptop running on Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1. My hard drive is partitioned into the three primary partitions EISA Configuration (141 MB), Recovery (D:) (15.00 GB), OS (C:) (282.95 GB), which I believe contain the diagnostic utilities, the factory image, and the OS, respectively.

I would be interested in shrinking the OS partition using the Vista Disk Management utility, in order to create a fourth extended partition (in which I'm planning to install a Linux OS -- I'm a scientist and Linux is my working environment).

My questions:

1) If I repartition my hard drive, will I still be able to access the Dell Factory Image Restore utility by pressing the F8 key at startup?

2) If the answer to question 1 is negative: will I still be able to use the Dell Factory Image Restore utility by using my Windows Vista DVD, opening a command prompt and starting the image restore with the command: imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\ ?

3) Assuming that the Dell Factory Image Restore utility will still work, what will its effect be? Will it restore the hard drive to factory settings and in particular restore also the original partition table, or will it limit itself to restoring the reduced C: partition (leaving the newly-created fourth partition untouched)? Will it reformat any portion of the hard drive that has been formatted to a different filesystem (ext3)? Will it restore the factory MBR? (Note: I am planning to make a backup copy of the original MBR with the Linux "dd" utility before installing Linux in any case.)

I have already used the Dell Factory Image Restore utility a couple of times, and have found it pretty handy; I would hate to lose it...

Many thanks in advance for your replies.

RobinBredin · Answer

Hi,

1) If I repartition my hard drive, will I still be able to access the Dell Factory Image Restore utility by pressing the F8 key at startup?

If you are allowed to make another partition to your Hard drive by using this method here, go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management. Then right click your new drive, select format. From there you can assign the drive an letter. Then your D Restore will be ok to use at a later date.

If you lose your D Restore partition though error or through using your Dell DVD, then you cannot recreate your D Restore partition using your Reinstall DVD, or download it from the dell web site.

Tschortscho · Answer

Hi RobinBredin, thanks for your reply.

If you are allowed to make another partition to your Hard drive by using this method here, go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management. Then right click your new drive, select format. From there you can assign the drive an letter. Then your D Restore will be ok to use at a later date.

I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying... Could you try rephrasing?

Cheers.

Windows General

Dell Factory Image Restore after repartitioning a hard drive?

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