No 'Dell Backup and Recovery' Option on system restore boot menu.

Hi

I'm really getting frustrated with my Dell laptop. It loads Windows 7 (Professional) but I want to do a system restore back to factory settings as it's 4 years old. All important data is backed up to cloud storage and double backed up on external hard drives.

Machine is a Latitude E6530 running Windows 7 Pro.

If I go to Windows drive manager I see there is a Dell Recovery Partition

'Dell Backup and Recovery' was not factory installed in my system, so I downloaded it and tried to run it. It ran for hours 'creating a disk image' or something. Why it has to do this if I just want to reformat and load the original drivers etc I don't know. I left it running overnight and it crashed. Try to run it again and I get an infuriating error that it has had a problem and has to close. The software is junk.

Next, I try from the advanced boot menu accessed by hammering the F8 key when the Dell logo is showing on startup. I go to the 'repair my system' option and there are various options but no Dell Backup and Recovery.

Why did Dell bother with a recovery partition when it cannot be accessed?

So as far as I see, it looks like my only option is to manually reformat the hard drive and clear off all the Dell proprietary junk and hope that Windows 7 will load the correct drivers. But even this seems to be an issue; if I run the command prompt and type 'format C:\' I get an error (though maybe this is me trying to use old DOS code with a different system'.

I've had this laptop for 4 years, most of the time something was wrong with it, two warranty repair calls. This will be my last Dell laptop but I would like to get a year or two more use out of it.

Before I go and manually wipe clean the hard drive (if that is even an option on this wretched thing) is there anything else I can try to attempt to restore the factory Dell image?

Thanks in advance!