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.

 

There's either a recovery program that you need to run in Windows or you need to boot into the recovery partition.

 

i know there is a recovery program, and I have tried it, the option i am looking for is not in the menu it is supposed to be in. So I cant do the restore. But, I know I still have the files required to do the factory image restore (Dell's way of restoring to factory settings), because i can see them using the program i talked about earlier. I just dont know how to access them to do the recovery manually.

 

Have you read your manual and/or visited the Dell support website?

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19279101.aspx

 

yeah, i cant find anything about manually restoring it when the files are missing

 

Kego is right on the money with that link. Fuzzy, you dont need to 'see' the files - if you need to restore, follow this process (step 3)

 

Hi Mate!
See post number 5867
"....
2. Shut down the XPS and then Restart while tapping the F8 key until you get to the advanced boot options
3. Select Repair Computer
4. On next screen accept the default us keyboard layout
5. On next screen, select windows user with admin rights from the list of users and key the password if prompted
6. From the System Recovery options select Dell Factory Image Restore. This will restore the XPS to a state it was in when you first took it out of the box.
7. When windows starts for the first time, follow and respond to all the prompts
...."

 

I can't believe Dell set aside 14.6GB partition for recovery drive on my XPS16! Is this different for different customers? (I have the 320GB 7200rpm HDD)