XPS M1730 Help Needed

Right i have been reading through a few posts to see if i can find the answer to my problem i have also been using my best friend google, but i just seem to be going around in circles {probably me being thick dosent help } it either goes way over my head, or people keep saying the complete opposite of whatever the previous poster says

I will start from the begining.

Bought a Dell XPS M1730, compared to my last laptop it is awsome {this one actually works } it was set up with Vista ultimate 32bit on a "400GB Free Fall Sensor Raid 0 Stripe - 2 X 200GB (7200RPM) Hard Drive" {whatever that means} now i have never had a clue about setting up or using Raid,or what the different Raid setups do, still havn't, but this COULD be one of my problems.

Right down to whats wrong.

I had a new Windows 7 ultimate 64x disc bought for me as a present, thought i would install it, now i knew that i could not upgrade from the Vista 32bit to windows 7 64bit and had to do a clean install.

Did the clean install and all went well, but now i need to sort of undo it all i want to put the laptop back to how it was when it came from the factory. The Dell recovery partition is still there with all the files, there are 6 folders, Dell, program files, sources, tools, users and windows. The factory.wim file is in the Dell folder.

I have tried booting the laptop and going into repair computer to see if i can get the D: partition to boot from the Dell image, but the computer only sees the windows 7 {dont know if this is because it is now running 64bit} if i let windows 7 load up then the D: drive shows up as Recovery D with all the right files in.

Is there anyway to get the laptop to see this drive so i can restore it to how it was?

Any help needs to be explained pretty easy, as i am not the greatest when it comes to p.c.'s

 

O.K. all done, sussed it out and everything back to normal all i did was install a copy of vista 32bit back on to the computer, let it install, then restart and press F8 on restart, then just go into repair and this time it let me do the factory restore.

Hope it helps anyone else.

 

Ugh...thanks for the update.

I'm having the exact same problem. So you had to install Vista and then the option came back? A bit cumbersome, seeing as how I never got any Vista discs with mine!

~Ibrahim~

 

It only took about 20 mins, never bothered doing any updates or anything, just loaded a vista disc and as soon as it had done the install i just restarted the comp.

Dont know if it will do the same thing of a burnt iso copy of windows {i had a original vista disc} but it might.

 

Cool beans.

So when you restarted, did you see something called "Restore to Dell Factory Image' or did you go through the prompts from "Repair my Computer"?

Still researching to see if I can get that option back in 7...

~Ibrahim~