epic dell recovery partition fail

God, I suck.

I thought I'd give Windows 7 a whirl on my snazzy new machine.

So, as the number of partitions on my hard drive has been maxed out by Dell (Media, Recovery, the enigmatic OEM partition, and C drive) I went for the upgrade option. This turned McAfee into instant nagware, I thought "ah well, just restore vista from the dell recovery partition...

... which now doesn't work.

Can anyone help me restore from the dell recovery partition? Please?

It's still there, but Ctrl F11 doesn't work. Google led me to this: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm, but it makes no mention of windows 7 or M1330s.

I just wish McAfee would pull their finger out. And obviously if I'd been able to make one more partition for W7 none of this would have happened.

 

Just reinstall from the operating system disc. F the restore partition. If you use media direct (what the hell is it???), then follow that guide, and just do a clean install. Fight back, and regain your hard earned HD space...lol...

Seriously, your machine did come with those discs, right?

Oh, and I loved your thread title...nice...

Oh, and I got my 1340 today...worth every penny...and I got a 150 dollar gift card...sweeeeettttttt...it's a snappy, instantly responsive machine, I tell you what...and looks d**n sexy doing it...

 

Nice!! That's excellent news with the 1340! So it's worth the extra spend from the sounds of it?

I'm very pleased with the new M1330 (got it yesterday - with all disks, I was worrying needlessly) and have just been tinkering away intermittently.

You're right of course - I should do a clean install.

I like the idea behind the restore partition - the convenience it offers to users who will not stray from the original configuration, but then the obvious flaw hit me - having the backup on the same hard disk is a bit erm pointless.

My (sadly missed) black M1330 had already been cleaned up with a fresh install of Ultimate so I guess I'm still exploring the XPS as Dell mean you to
experience it.

 

that sounds like a plan!! and you should have the reinstall disk-- if not, give dell hell!!

and what i usually do, is delete the recovery partition image, etc and make the partition larger. Then I use "Acronis True Image Home 2009" and make an exact duplicate of my OS and favorite programs. Then if the OS crashes, I can boot from the Acronis recovery disk, tell it where the image is and completely restore my pc in under 30 minutes- how sweet it is.........

What I have found, at least for me, is that while you may corrupt/crash your OS install, the other partitions are usually not affected; so you can use the Acronis Recovery Boot CD/DVD and restore it very easily. Or, Acronis also lets you make your backup on a usb hdd or flash drive, etc.

 

thanks, looks like today will be clean install day

wish me luck!

 

http://support.dell.com/support/top...A2E89689E13C2E040A68F5B280AA4&c=us&l=en&s=gen

 

genius! thank you!