Help with reformatting laptop

Question

Last night I decided I wanted to reformat my hard drive (Vostro 1500). However I didn't know about dell's way of doing this where you are supposed to press F8 and go through the dell factory image restore that way using the D:/ partition. Instead I just inserted the vista CD and went that route. However now I obviously lost all of my settings that originally came with the laptop. I DO still have the D:/ partition but I can't get to the dell factory image restore. That option is not given... Does anyone know how I can get this option back?

dgkpcon · Answer

It is not that you are missing the restore,it has been deleted with the OS re-install.And once deleted,it can not be recovered.

Darkday4 · Answer

Really? Why doesn't dell offer a download of it or something? Seems stupid that now I'm left with a partition with everything I need to do a restore except I can't use it because I'm missing the program...

ejn63 · Answer

The utility for restoring is there - it's just not the most user-friendly thing in the world.

You'll need to make a bootable CD or DVD (see BartPE for one easy way to do this). Then read:

http://www.nnseek.com/e/alt.sys.pcclone.dell/help_dell_mbr_factory_restore_image_option_lost_129277336t.html

dgkpcon · Answer

If you did a re-install of the OS then the dell restore is gone and no way to get it back.

Darkday4 · Answer

That appears to be EXACTLY what I need thanks!   I'm not sure if I will get to it today or not but I will report back after I see how it work.

Storage, Drives & Media

Help with reformatting laptop

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