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Moof1904

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 20, 2004
1,060
102
I have a Dell computer that a friend has asked me to restore for her. She claims that no recovery disks came with it. I know that Dell sometimes puts a recovery partition on the drive and that a certain key combination on startup will allow one to boot from the recovery partition. I've tried all those key commands, though, and none of them are working. Before I continue further with this trying to boot from recovery thing, I'd like to verify that there is one there.

Does this screen capture show that there's a recovery partition on this drive? Is that what the 3.6 gig partition is?
 

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XP Home is on the larger partition.

Is there a way I can make the hidden partition non-hidden so that I can go into the bios and manually set it as the startup partition, since the various Dell key combinations aren't working?

Wow! I just got the control-F11 key combination to finally work and boot the restore partition. I ran the disk repair utility on the drive today and now this key combination seems to be working. I think maybe the disk repair fixed the boot sectors or something.

Keeping my fingers crossed that the factory restore works.

Thanks!
 
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