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dell factory image restore help

I am trying to restore my laptop (studio xps 16) to factory settings using the recovery image. If I look in my computer, i can see C and D drives. D is my recovery partition with 7gb full out of 10gb. This is good and dandy except when i open the D drive, there is one folder that says RECOVERY that is empty. Why is it empty when there are 7gb's of files in there? I already have hidden files shown. I don't know how else to restore my laptop. Any ideas?

Also, I downloaded partition wizard home edition and i was able to view the files on the recovery partition. For some reason this program lets me see them, so i know they are there. But, when using regular windows explorer to look in the recovery folder there are no files.
Answer
Answer
its been a while since i did it, but i will try as best as i can...

-try putting in your installation disc and boot to disk.
-at the menu it will say install now but at the bottom it will say repair your computer (click this) ...it should look like this



-click the command prompt option and you are ready to type some stuff.
-be sure you have everything backed up on the drive you are going to format.
-type diskpart into the commpand prompt and wait for it to load
-when you can type again, type:     list disk
-type: select disk n   where n is the number of the drive you want which was in the list before
-now type: list partition and look for the partition number you want to format
-type: select partition n where n is the number of the partition from the last step
-now type: format partition n to erase all data from the partition

this should be it for formatting the drive, now you have to type more in the command prompt to restore your stuff

now, if your image is in the dell factory recovery location (d), then...

type this: imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\

it should take a while to do both the format and the restore, so be patient

when its all done, if it doesn't say to type exit, just type exit until the command prompt window is gone.

then, you will be back at the recovery menu, you can restart your pc (make sure you change the boot option back to hardrive instead of 'boot to disk')

and you should be done.

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Last updated April 25, 2023 Views 54,013 Applies to: