SupportAssist for Home PCs User’s Guide
System repair and reset
System repair
SupportAssist enables you to instantly rollback to a previous point in time on your PC to resolve boot issues or any other performance issues. Restoring your PC may help in resolving issues that are caused by virus or malware infections, registry corruption, system file corruption, issues with operating system patches, or drivers. This feature is automatically enabled on PCs with at least 50 GB of free hard drive space and where SupportAssist OS Recovery is available. If your PC has less than 50 GB of free hard drive space, you can manually enable the feature in SupportAssist or the operating system control panel settings.
After you manually install or update to the latest version of SupportAssist for Home PCs, it verifies if SupportAssist OS Recovery is supported on your PC. If supported, SupportAssist OS Recovery installation is automatically initiated. If the automatic installation fails, go to and click Install OS Recovery to install manually.
When you click Install OS Recovery, the recovery partition is re-created to save the files that you can use for your recovery. Click Install to complete the installation. If required, you must reboot your PC to complete the installation. If an error occurred while creating a hard drive partition to install SupportAssist OS Recovery, a message is displayed that you cannot retry the process and the options to repair and reset your PC are also removed. To troubleshoot the issue, contact Dell technical support.
After SupportAssist OS Recovery is installed, go to to repair the system anytime.
NOTE:If a critical hardware issue is detected on your PC, the system repair feature is disabled until you create a support request.
NOTE:This feature does not completely protect the program files. The non-Dell applications that are installed on your PC may be removed when the PC is restored to a previous restore point.
System reset
SupportAssist also enables you to reset the operating system of your PC. You can either reset the operating system to factory state or install the latest version of the operating system. Depending upon the state of your PC, the following options may be available:
- Reset to factory settings—install the factory image on your PC to reset the operating system to the state it was in when your PC was shipped from the Dell factory.
- Reset and update—download and install the most recent operating system on your PC along with the critical drivers and applications.
After SupportAssist OS Recovery is installed, go to to reset the system anytime.
CAUTION:The reset process permanently deletes all data on the hard drive and uninstalls any programs or drivers that you installed on your PC. It is recommended that you back up the data before performing a system reset.
NOTE: If
SupportAssist is unable to detect the factory image that was installed on your PC, only the
Reset and update option is displayed.
For more information about SupportAssist OS Recovery, see the SupportAssist OS Recovery User's Guide available on the SupportAssist OS Recovery documentation page.
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