Dell Datasafe local backup - anyone use restore?

Hi,
Has anyone used this for a complete system restore to factory state?
Will I need to install the latest drivers or will the system update itself?
I have my L502x almost one year and since then I have had the two USB 3.0 ports replaced, at which time the BIOS was flashed - will I need to do this again myself?
Also, NVidia have a new driver for the 540M graphics card.
I recently installed this but Windows never picked up on it as it was reporting the older driver in device manager and saying this was the most up to date.
Any advice or tips are much appreciated.
Thanks.

 

What's with the double-posting this?

You will not need to reflash the BIOS, that is done at the hardware level and is independant of the OS. You could swap HDDs and still be fine in fact.

The best way to update graphics drivers is to uninstall the old one and run a Driver Sweeper in Safe Mode of get ALL of the parts of it out, just installing over the old one often ends up mixing parts of drivers and odd things can happen.

 

Yes. It works as advertised.

The system is restored to original factory state. That includes drivers as they were at that time. If you want updates, you would need to install them.

 

I did a clean install not too long ago and I guess the original OEM restore files are wiped out? Can't seem to be able to retrieve it anymore.

 

If you deleted the partition that was called "recovery" then yes. Said partition is what is used to store the files for a factory restore.

 

Did you first create the Recovery disks? (I think it's three DVD-Rs.) If you did, you can use those to restore the laptop to factory state. Those disks perform the same job as the Recovery partition.

I deleted the Dell Recovery partition to free up almost 20 GB, but first I created the Recovery disks and a Recovery USB flash drive. I can use either to restore to factory state.

 

^^Unfortunately I didn't do that. Is there any to get that re-imaged? Also, when I checked there is about 20gb of hidden space utilized but I couldn't locate anything about partition.

 

you can check if you have the recovery partition in computer management->disk management

if you do have it intact you can try downloading dell datasafe local backup_basic from here (step 2): http://dslbdownload.datasafelocalbackup.com/dsldownload-en.html (300mb)

and install it to create a recovery usb/dvd. those should restore it to the factory state.

 

On disk management, Disc 0 shows: 102MB Healthy, then 19.53 GB Unallocated, and (C 446.13 GB NTFS 75% Free. It doesn't showing anything else as to OEM or any other partition. I'm not sure why there are 19.8 GB unallocated space being held up.

 

19.8 GB is about right for the restore partition IIRC. Perhaps you erased it without adding the space to the system partition during the installation of Windows?

 

Yep, 19.8 GB is probably left over from a deletion of the Dell Recovery partition. Mine was 19.53 GB. If you didn't explicitly add that space to another partition, it would remain unallocated after the deletion of the Recovery partition.

 

I guess I did deleted it when I was doing a clean install. The thing that pisses me off is that Dell had included a bunch of recovery discs including a copy of W7 and I found out that it was nothing but a bunch of old drivers and not OEM recovery material.