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Absolution101 wrote:
Nope, I havent touched it. One thing I did do was create a Vista partition, then delete that - but that was taken out of the main C: partition, not the recovery. If I look in Norton PartitionMagic there is a 2gb Partition which I'm guessing is the recovery one...

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Absolution101,

Ctrl-F11 can be fixed with DSRfix utility.

Nope, I havent touched it. One thing I did do was create a Vista partition, then delete that - but that was taken out of the main C: partition, not the recovery. If I look in Norton PartitionMagic there is a 2gb Partition which I'm guessing is the recovery one...

I tried the DSRfix thing, and it doesnt work.

I fixed it, ran the dsrfix again and everything showed up as OK.

I rebooted, and I now have the www.dell.com blue bar, but when I do Ctrl-F11 it says

"Cannot recover
No bootable devices - strike F1 to retry boot or F2 to enter setup"

Then if I dont press Ctrl-F11 it says

"PBR3... done
(name) is missing... press any key to reboot"

I can't remember the name of what is missing. However if I manually turn the laptop off, it will boot up no problem. One thing I noticed is that when it boots correctly, it says "PBR2... done" instead of "PBR3" which it does when it fails to boot.

How can I use Norton Ghost to restore - will it have the same result as Dell's built in restore?

You need to download PTEDIT32 from norton. Then Change the partition to be visible instead of invisible.

The disk will need 3 partitions. A small utility partition, an ntfs partition, and another restore partition.

There is a folder on the restore partition that has the Ghost 8 .GHO and .GHS files.
Thats the image of the NTFS partition. It wont boot and wont work if you deleted the utility partition.
The boot.ini file and registry etc needs the NTFS to be the second partition.

So you download ptedit32 and then CHANGE THE PARTITION TYPE from DB AND DE TO 06 AND 0C

Then when you reboot they are visible as fat32 and you can copy files from them to somewhere else.

Then you make C:\ the Restore partition. Before you do that though you rename the autoexec.bat file
as this will start the dell restore utility. If you can get that to boot You can run the recover.exe file from the BIN directory and manually restore the ntfs partition from the .gho file in the IMG directory on the restore partition. recover.exe is ghost without the ability to save images.

Once the 3rd partition is made active it boots as win9X on older dells. On newer dells its win2003PE so
all bets are off in that case. What you are trying to do is boot msdos and run ghost for msdos to restore
a .GHO image file to the NTFS partition.

Copying the files onto some other media gives you a chance of fixing the drive so that its as it came from the factory.

Ghost should be able to make an image of the first utility partition. So you make a drive with 3 partitions,
then put the utility partition back. Then install xp bare on an ntfs partition but you leave 4 gigs free at the end of the drive that is not partitioned. Then you reboot with msdos ghost disk and make another fat32 Bootable partition on the end of the drive. Thats the restore partition. Once this is done you
boot xp and copy all the files from your offline storage back to the restore partition. You then run DSRFIX
from a BOOT CD or boot floppy to hide the partitions. Then do CTRL F11 to restore.