Making a Restore CD for those NEW Dell Inspiron 1300's

Browntoa

thought I'd start a thread for those wanting to make a recovery CD for those new Dell Laptops without the ISO file or the option to burn a restore CD to stop the other Dell threads getting clogged

discuss

thewizard

I dont think you can without the Dell OS Recovery CD tool kit thing (found in Dell Accessories, in All Programs)

Bubba_Shaboo

If you just want the discs you could try this:

:cool: BLAG :cool:

Okay, 5 Dell discs on their way.

Phoned Technical Support this morning on 0870 90 80 800.

Option 2 (Portable System)

Option 2 (Inspiron)

Spoke to a lovely lady who may well have been from the call centre in India judging by the accent.

She needed the Sevice Tag number from the sticker on the underside of the lappy and also asked for telephone number and e-mail address.

She then asked how she could help:

I explained in a slightly muddled sort of way that I understood these laptops came with the ability to burn a restore disc but I'm told this isn't there anymore and I'd noticed on a forum that I visit (not named) that someone else had the same problem and they had phoned Dell and Dell had said that they would send out some discs so if that was possible could I have some discs.

How I've written above is how I said it, I didn't pause, I just waffled and when I mentioned the discs the lady said 'So you just want the discs?'. I said Yes and it seemed to me that she was slightly relieved because it was an easy call to deal with. She read out what discs were included but to be honest I didn't catch everything but it includes drivers, DVD software and I believe an OS disc - possibly the very disc I've just paid £5.88 for.

Anyways she took some contact details and said I may be sent a customer satisfaction survey and would I fill it in. I said of course, and also complimented her on the service. She then said it would take around five days and she would phone to see if they had arrived OK.

So basically it's not really a blag, just phone up and explain like I did and hopefully the discs will wing their way to you.

Don't forget to be polite and if you're successful make sure you fill in and return the customer satisfaction survey, it's not easy working in a call centre and positive feedback can do wonders for the person concerned.

HTH

Bubba©

PS. Still haven't used mine, it's on charge!

WestieFan

I did exactly the same thing Bubba.

I got my laptop three weeks ago and was looking for a way to do the disk. I discovered that they no longer send them out automatically, as the drive is partitioned now and you follow some procedure or other to re-install if anything goes wrong. The recovery cd thingy has been removed from these laptops. I wasn't happy with that and phoned them up.

I got Ireland, and a very nice lady said she would send them out straight away. She actually phoned a couple of days later to see if they had arrived!

After hearing some horrific tales about the CS, I was pleasantly surprised!

Ally

Oh this thread may help!

I want to format the HDD to get rid of all the junk Dell have put on it. I also want to use XP Pro or Win2000 Pro (so don't have to backup the XP home they have on their). Is it just the drivers that we need to back up? or do we need to back anything else up?

point3

I did the same as Bubba on a previous occasion...

Told Dell that I had tried removing unwanted software and then tried to burn a recovery disc, but thought that the disc was corrupted. I had phoned Dell on the number on the invoice, got through to Sales rep in Ireland who passed me onto Technical support in India, then was passed onto a different Technical support department in India before being passed back to Customer Services in Ireland where I spoke to a nice chap with a South African accent who promptly arranged for the Windows XP disc plus all the driver discs to be sent out to me :eek: . Got a call from the courier company later that day and the discs arrived by courier the next morning.

In the end, though, I continued using the Windows XP disc I had burned (which I thought hadn't burned properly) and it worked fine! - it reinstalls Windows XP without any of the additional rubbish. Needn't have spent 25 minutes on the phone being passed from Ireland to India and back to Ireland after all :rolleyes:

Browntoa

you can get all the drivers you need off the service and support part of the dell web site

just download and burn to CD and then insert it when it asks for any drivers after the re-install

buggu

You only need to back up all the hardware drivers on there unless you got the disks for them, anything else is optional.

I would recommend you install a good driver back up program to extract the drivers. I used to use program like winret which saves the drivers into seprate folders for each device so you good choose which ones you wanted to back up. However seems they have updated it so now only get a list of drivers backed up ( no idea which drivers for which hardware) but guess you can find another simillar program.

chickadee

Hi. This thread worries me slightly. I'm not a tecky and have bought a Dell Inspiron 1300 recently. I really like it and it was cheap!
What disks do I need and what should I have backed up? Thinking about it, i suppose the operating system is a good one .
How do I go about doing this? Is there a Dell utility to help?

Sorry to be thick, we have an IT guy at work who does all this stuff for us. We just say "Mike I have lost a file can you restore it please?" and it happens! (As if by magic!)

AJP558

Browntoa wrote:

you can get all the drivers you need off the service and support part of the dell web site

just download and burn to CD and then insert it when it asks for any drivers after the re-install

You can download the drivers, but you can't download the Sonic/Roxio DVD playing & burning software. After formatting & re-installing XP I had to contact Dell and they sent me the full set of CDs even though it was only the DVD software I asked for. I am also happy with their CS so far even if I don't like jobs moving offshore I can't fault the service I have had from Dell.

Browntoa

there is some stuff here about how the deel reover partition works and how to get at it

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm