Merely changing TPM setting in BIOS screwed up my system !!!

I have a E4200 originally loaded with Windows Vista Ultimate, I performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. It worked perfectly except the WAVE software does not detect or let me enroll fingerprint, and "Security Manager" application could not be installed.

It wasn't a big deal, but I don't know why I even started doing all of the followings on Xmas day......

I did some reserch and found out the glitches might be caused by TPM not activated in BIOS, so I went in to take a look, it was set in "activated" but grayed out because the checkbox in front of TPM is unchecked. ALL I DID WAS CHECKING THAT BOX ON, AND MY NIGHTMARE BEGAN FROM HERE.

1st boot after doing that, I got:

- a window from Connection Manager telling me it has experience unexpected error,
- a big windows without identification of source, gave me a lot of errors about userDomainName native call failed at SmithMicro.Commom.... something
- another windows telling me ACPI can not be initiated
- the worst of all is yet another windows from the OS, saying it has entounter a critical problem and will restart automatially in one minute -- that does not allow me any time to investigate problems further.

Troubleshooting steps:
1. First of all what I tried was undo what I did in BIOS, unfortunatelly that does not help.
2. I boot into Safe mode, tried restoring system into a couple different points and it did not help getting rid of any of those four error windows.
3. I had an idea to uninstall all Dell software under safe mode, but a list of programs never made it to show up (i guess the OS is pretty much screwed up)
4. Well, since I can't uninstall them, how abor disabling the services? I did that and boot into normal mode and it did not help.

After a couple hours I gave up, I decided to back up my data and do a fresh install. All of above are just a description, my main question in this post is about the 2GB partition which was named "Recovery" by Dell. I can't find a recovery function in BIOS which I can take advantage of that, is it configured like IBM thinkpad's ssytem restore? Or I could totally disregard that partition and delete it during my new installation?

 

You can throw away the Recovery partition.

You cannot install the security manager cause you didn't install the security drivers yet.

 

Do you have the Vista disk? If so, use that to re-partition the drive. Using Windows 7's disk to create a new partition will result in a junk 200MB partition being created in addition to what you wanted to do.

 

Thank you for the advise, I do have Vista disk, but I already finished Win7 installation before noticing it created the 200MB partition. It's okay, at least I gained 2GB mroe space by deleting the Dell "recovery" partition.

 

Haha, that works...gained 1.8GB.