Manual System Restore not working following Gooddell's directions . . .

Question

I'm attempting to use Dell's restore partition manually by following the directions located on

However, I'm running into this intensely irritating snag. I cannot find c:\bin at all. I change directory to c:\img like it says, and I type c:\bin\recovery, but all it returns is "bad command or filename - "c:\bin\recovery"

I've attempted to type the command with and without the quotation marks. I've attempted to look for the "bin" directory to see if it even exists. I cannot find the bin directory at all. I have the img directory, and it contains the file "FI.GHO".

I even attempted to manually go through every directory that I could find, and a couple directories have "restor~1.exe" files which type in the command line to run them, but they all say that they require win32 or cannot be run in DOS, or something to that effect.

Am I doing something wrong, Am I missing something?

BTW, the reason I'm doing this is because DSRFIX won't work due to the fact that it keeps returning a Fatal error for pbr1 not being FAT16. I can't find anything on the internet about how to fix that issue. It's the only fatal error. The rest are all alerts. I've seen the question about it all over the internet in forums, but no answers of how to solve the issue of fixing a fatal error like that.

I gave up trying to fix the error, and decided to restore my system manually, but I can't seem to find/access the bin file, much less the recovery.exe file that it's supposed to contain.

PudgyOne · Answer

Jimdin,

I never tried this, but probably should when I get my new bigger hard drive.

Try reading...

How to restore Dell factory image when PC restore does not work?

See if that helps with restoring the recovery partition.

Rick

Tom Green · Answer

If you do a search for Ghost 2003.ISO you can download it and fix your computer. The ISO is for legal use only and must get rid of it after you finish. Tom

Jimdin · Answer

Thanks both of you. And as for you Tom Green, thanks for the suggestion. It might have worked if I hadn't figured out something else.

What ended up working for me, finally, was actually modifying a step that Goodell advises us not too.

I followed the directions up to the ptedit point, which is only like the first or second step. Anyhow, Goodell advises us not to boot directly to the partition after setting it as type OC, 80 because of what the autoexec.bat will do. Well, I disobeyed that advisement and simply allowed it to boot to the restore partition. The first time I did this it was by accident, and when it booted to ghost, I merely exited. However, I discovered something had reset the pbr when after I rebooted, I accidentally allowed it to continue without booting to the cd. I saw that it was trying to boot to windows, so, knowing that this happens, I checked ptedit, and sure enough, the settings had been reset somehow.

So knowing that it automatically resets, I went ahead, re-edited ptedit so that it could boot to the restore partition. Sure enough it booted to the partition, and it must have reset satisfactorily because I went ahead and just told it to use dell restore partition, and it worked.

In case anyone's wondering. I bought the laptop E1505 with Windows XP back in 2006 or 07, not sure. It uses Ghost 10, so I'm not even sure Ghost 2003 would have even worked, and on another good note, I actually found out that I have a copy of Ghost 2003.

Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to copy my partition using Goodell's instructions, and I'm going to see if I can't figure out how to fix my dsr eventually. However, so long as I have this wonderful dsrfix boot cd with Ptedit, I should be able to repeat what I did.

Tom Green · Answer

Hello jimdin   Glad you got it working. Good work, and thanks for letting us know. Tom

Windows General

Manual System Restore not working following Gooddell's directions . . .

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