I am not familiar with installation with Windows recovery partition.It is messy for me. There may be a solution. 1.Create a recovery disk from your Windows7 PC. 2.Boot from the recovery disk & check if you can install OS from the recovery image[if it is there]. If not,Read further You should keep the small partitions [around 200-300 Mb] which contain DELL Diagnostics software.It is useful to find any hardware faults.If you cannot find these partitions,you should try Easeus parttion Master to see if you can find any Dell partitions.You should "Assign drive letter" to hidden partitions if any .If you can find the Dell OS partition [around 20 GB] & check Dell datasafe works .If datasafe is not working for you,you should backup all the Dell partitions to an external drive & save the mess for later.It is useful if you finds a way to restore them from the disk image.For that,you can use Acronis true image or DriveImageXML. Alternate method,I would suggest is to download Windows8 upgrade officially from Microsoft & use it with your Windows8 key From here,you can download windows.microsoft.com/.../upgrade-product-key-only.
Hello. I have the same problem like these: [URL] and [URL] A few weeks ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 2330 with win 8. But I do not like win8 and therefore deleted it immediately and Installed win 7. During the installation win7 I have seen 5 partitions on hdd. As i understand that is recovery partitions with native Dell's win 8. Win 7 was installed on a primary partition after formatting. After a time, i needed to back to the win 8, but unfortunately I did not create any recovery disk, and it is not possible to select other partition for boot and recovery on F12(such as it was on my laptop) except the partition with operating system. I do not know about it until now.  I would like to install authentic Dell's Win8 again that was installed before, with accept the key from bios. What can i do? All partitions are untouched. Clean install was only on main partition....MBR is overwritten. I have tried Dell Datasafe Local, it says that it cannot be installed because my hard disk does not have the factory recovery image.  Please, help me to restore back native Dell's Windows 8. Thank you. Best wishes.                                 
Reinstall Windows 8 on Dell Ispiron 2330 (have no recovery disc ((( )