Hi EurasiaOverland, Thanks for posting. As I read your post, I see you've been very dilligent in backin up your information.  Congratulations, as most people don't do this, and are in a panic by this time. By chance did you create a backup/recovery disk or usb drive?  If so, please use that to restore your Windows OS.  If you didn't, then reinstalling Windows 7 would be your best option.   Here is information about DBAR:  [URL] And if you need additional information about OS reinstall, here's an article you may find helpful:  [URL]   If you are using a Dell OEM Win 7 disk, it does not require the activation key.  If you are using a purchased software disk, then you will need the activation key.
Hi I'm really getting frustrated with my Dell laptop. It loads Windows 7 (Professional) but I want to do a system restore back to factory settings as it's 4 years old. All important data is backed up to cloud storage and double backed up on external hard drives. Machine is a Latitude E6530 running Windows 7 Pro. If I go to Windows drive manager I see there is a Dell Recovery Partition 'Dell Backup and Recovery' was not factory installed in my system, so I downloaded it and tried to run it. It ran for hours 'creating a disk image' or something. Why it has to do this if I just want to reformat and load the original drivers etc I don't know. I left it running overnight and it crashed. Try to run it again and I get an infuriating error that it has had a problem and has to close. The software is junk. Next, I try from the advanced boot menu accessed by hammering the F8 key when the Dell logo is showing on startup. I go to the 'repair my system' option and there are various options but no Dell Backup and Recovery. Why did Dell bother with a recovery partition when it cannot be accessed? So as far as I see, it looks like my only option is to manually reformat the hard drive and clear off all the Dell proprietary junk and hope that Windows 7 will load the correct drivers. But even this seems to be an issue; if I run the command prompt and type 'format C:\' I get an error (though maybe this is me trying to use old DOS code with a different system'. I've had this laptop for 4 years, most of the time something was wrong with it, two warranty repair calls. This will be my last Dell laptop but I would like to get a year or two more use out of it. Before I go and manually wipe clean the hard drive (if that is even an option on this wretched thing) is there anything else I can try to attempt to restore the factory Dell image? Thanks in advance!
No 'Dell Backup and Recovery' Option on system restore boot menu.