Reinstalling Vista on DELL ha!ha!

I have just done a laptop where the customer needed the laptop wiped and Vista re-installed
Apparently he was given an install disk with the laptop and when he tried to do it himself it failed.

The real problem with the laptop was due to a faulty hard drive. If you are lucky you can sometimes get way without having to buy a new hard drive if you are willing to sacrifice some disk space. You can try to reduce the main partition until you have a working volume, thus avoiding the bad area of the disk. I took the drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another machine to look at the partitions and found four! One was a bit of space at the beginning followed by a recovery partion, then the main partition, and finally another small unassigned partition.

I left the 10GB recovery volume alone, got rid of the small unassigned partition and reduced the main partition down to 100GB, formated and tested and was ready to install Vista.

Now here is the thing. The install disk is useless because to does not have any device drivers. The restore partition is ok but to get to it you need a working DELL windows system where you can use CTRL+F11 to fire up the restore process. I found a way to fire up the restore process by using a Vista Boot disk to get to a dos command prompt and using a tool called imagex on the tools folder of the restore partition.

The system restored nicely, just had to remove Mcafee and install AVG and some other software and it was done.

My bone of contention is that manufacturers say you can restore from a restore partition but if the whole disk is trashed then you have no chance, and if the windows system is trashed then you can not get to it. They want you to make your own restore disks. Its like the supermarkets wanting you to use the self service tills: and that get my goat because they want you to do their job for them aswell!