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    Getting the recovery partition back?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by Edtek, Aug 7, 2008.

  1. Edtek

    Edtek Notebook Guru

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    I have had my M1530 for a few months now, and yesterday when I went to turn it on, there were no partitions on the drive and all the data was gone.

    Since then I have re-setup the laptop using the Media Direct CD and the proper drivers, but is there a way to get the actual recovery partition back?

    It was much faster than restoring the computer via disks, and I didn't have to really worry about anything. I just hit the restore key at boot and away it went.

    I have checked the hard drive for errors and what not, and the tests came back fine, so I don't really know what happened to lose everything, but these things happen..

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.
     
    Edtek, Aug 7, 2008
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  2. Forte

    Forte NBR's Supreme Angel

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    Nope, Mediadirect repartitions your entire drive. All partitions are lost. From the moment you stuck that disc in and chose the partition for mediadirect to be on, it clears the drive. Everything is reset.

    You should have just rebooted as sometimes the Hard Drive seems like theres nothing on it and desktop is completely blank. (Though its never happened to me on my XPS M1530 and its only happened once or twice on my E1505), all it takes is a reboot.
     
    Forte, Aug 7, 2008
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  3. Edtek

    Edtek Notebook Guru

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    I restarted it several times, so I booted to the OS cd, and sure enough there were no partitions defined at all.

    I called Dell XPS support, and they said there are times the default image they use can cause partition corruption.

    I just wanted that specific partition back, but if I can't get it back then I will just create one with Ghost or something.
     
    Edtek, Aug 7, 2008
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  4. Forte

    Forte NBR's Supreme Angel

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    Yeah, it could be the hard drive or it wasn't imaged properly. The recovery partition cannot be recovered. You will never be able to restore your laptop to factory condition without that hidden recovery partition. You can use Norton Ghost, just be careful next time. You might want to run the command:

    "chkdsk c:"

    And see if there are any bad sectors on your hard drive or if there is any corruption whatsoever.
     
    Forte, Aug 7, 2008
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  5. jnewell

    jnewell Notebook Consultant

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    Two suggestions that I do when I get a new machine:

    1. Make a complete image on some separate drive. I like Acronis but lots of other good products will do this.

    2. Run a complete surface test on the drive in case there is a bad sector somewhere. Did that this weekend on a new 1tb drive...that took a while... ;)
     
    jnewell, Aug 7, 2008
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