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January 20th, 2008 17:00

Help restoring to a factory state

I spent many hours searching the internet and these forums trying to come up with a solution to the problem of restoring my Dell Inspiron 531 as it was from the factory.

I thought that I would share the solution that I found with everyone here since a common question is "How do I restore my Dell to a factory state?"

It's simple actually and does not even involve the Ctrl+F11 function (which does not exist on my system, btw).

All you need to do is press F8 to bring up the Advanced Boot Options menu. Next select the very first option Repair Your Computer. Then select the final option on the menu which should be something to the effect of Dell Factory Image Restore. Just follow the prompts from there and VIOLA, your computer has now been restored to its factory state. I believe this way will only work if 1) Your Recovery Partition is intact and 2) You haven't installed WinXP over Vista. I could be wrong on that last part though.

It's as simple as that and trust me, I've tried everything suggested except for imageX, I'm just not savvy enough to use that method, sorry folks.

I hope this helps everybody.

73 Posts

January 22nd, 2008 01:00

I must say that sifting through the nearly endless number of posts on this subject lead me down a number of different paths, but none that I read, including those with multiple pages of replies, showed this as a solution. It is my opinion that if Dell included this information with the owners manual, the first place I investigated, people might not be as frustrated trying to restore their machines to a factory state. Just a little fyi, I've RAR'd my recover partition and burned it to DVD for safe keeping.
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