Recovery partition

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Memoryalpha
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2016 10:09 am

Recovery partition

#1 Post by Memoryalpha » Mon Apr 04, 2016 10:50 am

I was recently given a "broken" laptop by a friend. Turned out there wasn't much wrong with it other than that the cpu fan was a bit clogged with dust/lint (causing the cpu to overheat then shut down) and the OS was corrupted. The laptop is an old dell Inspiron 14r n4110 running win 7 and it has a recovery partition and did not come with any dvd recovery media. But reinstalling the os manually rendered it inaccessible. It's still there, and according to Dell's recovery program still intact. However when I try to go through the recovery process (ctrl-f11) or use the recovery utility it's not seeing the partition on reboot. According to what I've read in various forums reinstalling the OS manually removed some pointer in the MBR. There are ways to get to it and restore it to factory spec but most of them involve downloading utilities from sites that had my antivirus and malware software wanting to scream and run away. What I'd like to do is either restore the OS and leave the partition in place, or preferably extract the partition to an external drive, (It's 16 gigs and thus too big for a DVD) and restore from there. Any help or advice on this would be appreciated.

Inspiron 14R N4110
Win 7
4gig ram
320gb hd (16g recovery partition 100mb utility partition, and the rest is the OS/data)

phoenix00
Posts: 16
Joined: Mon May 17, 2010 10:32 pm
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Re: Recovery partition

#2 Post by phoenix00 » Fri Apr 08, 2016 5:01 pm

Very nice! I love getting my hands on these!

My advice is either a) call Dell support and see if they are able to send you recovery discs for free/ reasonable cost, if you are hell bent on the factory OS build; or b) stick with a clean reinstall, download drivers from Dell's website, and reactivate win7 with the product key sticker on the bottom of the system.

You might be able to use bcdedit or something similar to access the recovery partition again but messing around with the MBR is not worth the time. I usually go with B). You get the advantages of a clean system (no junkware!~!!!), get SP1 integrated right off the bat, and get to build up the system the way you see fit.

Best of luck. Please keep us updated~!

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