You likely had the option to create your own recovery disks from the system which obviously you did not. At this point you have little choice, aside from chucking the unit. You may well be able to do the download from Dell but it will still cost you, Dell OS is pretty proprietary, some are.
I have a Dell Laptop 1545, ddr processorT4500 and it was running slow. The Geeksquad called and informed me that the hard drive crashed. I'll need the recovery disk. Dell is asking 39.99 which is much too high. I would have thought that the Geeksquad would have made a recovery disk. I was informed that they are not allowed to. My question is why didn't they inform me to do it before putting my laptop throw the diagnostic test? Well now I need the recovery disk. Can I down load the recovery disk on line?

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