Reinstall Windows 7 from Recovery Partition on a Dell Inspiron N5110 laptop after FORMATING C: drive

Hi,

I desperately need HELP! I have formated my laptop Dell Inspiron N5110 and reinstall a copy of windows 7 after noticing several viruses running on my pc. But I didn't delete or format the Recovery Partition. The recovery partition is intact. I now want to recover my pc to the factory settings of the original windows but I do not know if it is possible and how. I didn't know that I could just use the Dell Datasafe from the beginning before formatting my pc (how stupid I am). I have given a letter to the Recovery partition (F and I know can see all the files included inside it. After searching for a while, some people suggesting to execute the following cmd under "Tools" dir (I do find factory.wim):

imagex /apply f:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\
Can anyone please help me??? I really need help with this! Can anyone give me guidlelines what to do???

Thanks,

Chris.

 

I found the following post trying a method with WAIK disk but I m not sure if it is gonna work. What do you think?

Reinstall Windows 7 from Recovery Partition on a Dell Studio 1555 laptop - Super User

Also, I haven't mentioned that I do not have any recovery disks. My only hope is with the partition recovery

 

anyone please?? the partition recovery is my only hope!

 

I don't get around to this forum every day, but I'm surprised it's been a couple days and you haven't had an answer from one of the forum regulars.

IAC, I've taken a quick scan at the Super Users thread you mentioned, and I'm not sure if it would really work. The references to WAIK are correct to the extent WAIK is the official means of obtaining the imagex.exe utility. However, the restore procedure appears to be attempted from your booted Windows installation rather than from a bootable CD/DVD recovery environment. Maybe that works, but I'd rather not be booted from the partition I'm trying to restore.

To give you a bit of background, your first post is on the right track regarding the imagex command, which you need to restore Dell's factory.wim backup image. The catch is imagex isn't included in Windows or the Win7 Recovery Environment by default, which is frustrating because it was included in Dell's Vista Recovery Environment. (See this webpage I put together for the corresponding Vista procedure.)

With Win7, however, you need to obtain the imagex.exe utility yourself. Normally that means installing the massive 1.7GB WAIK just to get the tiny 370KB imagex.exe file embedded in it. (Talk about overkill!) Once you have it, the general idea is to copy it onto a flash drive, boot to any WinPE environment (such as a BART's CD or booting a Vista or Win7 DVD to its recovery environment), and then launch imagex.exe from the command line to restore factory.wim to your computer's OS partition.

You apparently have a Win7 installation DVD so you can use that to boot into a PE recovery environment, but the hard part is finding a copy of imagex.exe. If you have access to a Dell Vista computer you can copy it from that computer's Recovery partition. Otherwise, you may need to install the WAIK and extract the imagex.exe file from within it.


Dan Goodell

 

Having just recovered a laptop from a very serious Virus infection, I also had to reinstall the original dell image.
However, after spending a lot of time trying to follow the instructions on various sites I gave up and followed my gut insticts (I have been repairing computers for family and lots of 'friends' so I am not a novice)

So here are my guidelines for restoring a Dell:

1. You will need access to the Internet so get a friend or use another computer to get a copy of Imagex.zip. I cannot link to the place I found it as I am not sure of the copyright issues. (search google though)
2. Unzip it and you will find 2 files. Save both of these to a flash drive so that you can use them later.
3. Use a BART PE disc to boot the the broken laptop/computer into an XP session. If you don't have a Bart disk then again use google to find it.
4. Once the computer is up and running, use 'file explorer' to find the RECOVERY partition.
5. Look around this partition to find the file called 'factory.wim'
6. Copy the two files you got earlier from your flash drive to the same place as the 'factory.wim' file
7. Now using Explorer, find out the drive letter of the hard drive which you are going to reinstall the image on to.
8. Open a Command prompt window.
9. Now type in the following - change the last bit (c:\) to whatever drive letter you found in step 7:

imagex /apply factory.wim 1 c:\

Hopefully after a short time you will have a functioning computer again.

 

Worked like a charm also on IDell Inspiron 15 N5010 with preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium!!! Thank you!