Recovery partition

[adamlevine]

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)

[rogfanther]

Boot from Hiren´s cd, choose the plop boot manager, then choose to boot from the recovery partition

[HaQue]

why not grab a copy of win 7, and use dell drivers from: http://www.dell.com/support/home/au/en/ ... 10/drivers

you can go to microsoft and use the media creation tool.
personally I would put an SSD in it and win 10, I do 100,s of laptops for edu sector and it makes a world of difference. I generally wipe the disk, including all partitions (recovery included). then, if not using MDT or SCCM, boot windows from USB, install drivers, install software. done.

or you could follow something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh9_QkmC5kQ
" How to obtain your Dell factory restore disk for FREE "

or post on a forum asking someone for a recovery disk.

fresh install and getting totally rid of problematic filesystem is always better.

If you want to keep anything on the disk, just take out disk, put it in a desktop, create full disk image, run data recovery software on the image.

there are a million ways to accomplish what I think you want to do.

btw,

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.

You shouldnt ever need to.
dont get anything from any website that isnt Dell. some driver sites are OK, but navigating all the ads and 20 "download here" buttons is risky. Win 10 will have most drivers included already, and for the ones it doesnt, win 8.1 ones will probably work, or you just track them down.

[Dweller]

Hi!
I'm here with the same issue
I've recently received an ASUS A53SD-ES71 from a friend. He had formatted the laptop, he without thinking formatted dirve 0 which contains all the ASUS software that is necessary for the computer. He is unable to find the boot disk that should have been included. Upon hitting F9 there is no option for a windows setup, as it has been wiped out. The recovery partition was wiped out I am thinking

[HaQue]

the other place that contains all the ASUS software that is necessary for the computer is the ASUS website.
you can get Windows from a number of places.
on another PC you can create a usb boot disk using either a DVD or .iso file.

I always delete all partitions as I setup windows with latest software from website.

If you dont know how to do it, better find someone to help. it is basic stuff.

[rogfanther]

Hi!
I'm here with the same issue
I've recently received an ASUS A53SD-ES71 from a friend. He had formatted the laptop, he without thinking formatted dirve 0 which contains all the ASUS software that is necessary for the computer. He is unable to find the boot disk that should have been included. Upon hitting F9 there is no option for a windows setup, as it has been wiped out. The recovery partition was wiped out I am thinking

The restore disks are not included, the user must create them upon first uses of the machine.
If he formatted the disk and deleted partitions, the only way to get the factory system is either to find someone selling those disks ( there are sites in the 'net that do it ) or ask it from Asus, for a fee.

You can download windows from the MS site, and the drivers can be found in the Asus site. A normal computer repair shop should be able to sort that for you.