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General discussion

Cant access recovery partition after windows install.

by robby305 Dec 23, 2012 10:41PM PST

Ok I hope someone can help me out as I am close to trying to figure this out but yet so far away.. lol

Ok my niece was telling me her dell was not working right so I decided to just do a clean factory restore as a scan with malware bytes revealed over 30 viruses/trojans! Someones gonna get a sit down to talk about her surfing habits but I digress. I figure at this point a clean restore is easier than trying to remove these viruses. So I go to do the normal F8, repair my computer step and see that the repair my computer function doesn't work. Ok let me boot to windows 7 disk and select the repair option and use that for factory restore. Again nothing, usually Dell datasafe options will allow me to do this. I then notice that the recovery partition was not showing up. I called her and asked and it seems my sisters so called boyfriends fancies himself a "computer expert" and last time they were having problems decided to just reinstall windows which I assume some how lost the connection to the recovery partition.

I installed EaseUS free partition manager and see that the Recovery partition is still there just not accessible. Is there a way I can make this partition bootable again so that i can assess it from the repair menu and possible repair this back to factory?

also if I go like im going to reinstall windows when it says in what partition you want to install windows I can also see the recovery partition.

Thanks..

rob

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After that you use RESTORE MEDIA.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Dec 23, 2012 10:52PM PST

I have yet to find any supported method other than restoring the drive from an image backup to get that working after such events.

If Dell does have a way, it's not readily available at there site.

When this happens I restore from the image I saved when the machine was new (most folk don't have such) and if that is not available we use the restore media that we made or came with the machine.
Bob

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