Dell Laptop Inspiron 6400 - how to make recovery disc?

closed

The method described (boot, hold down CTRL F11) has the same effect. dban will wipe the recovery partition.

You could do a macrium reflect image and boot disc to remove the risk.

waterwatereverywhere

Hi Closed,

Please can you tell me what you mean by the last part and how I do that - I'm not technical and your suggestion has gone right over my head!

Thx

closed

If you want to backup the machine as it is now (in case anything goes wrong with a factory restore), you'll need an external hard drive, and a blank cd, install macrium reflect free, and do a disk image backup of the whole disk (not clone) to the external hard disk, and create the macrium boot cd at the end, there is a video and links in the speedup sticky above. Do a test boot of the macrium cd, just to make sure it works and can see the external hard drive, as it's based on linux

then once done, boot the machine, pressing CTRL F11, restore, confirm, and run the factory restore (assuming the factory restore partition hasn't been wiped), 10 minutes later it should be like new, install ccleaner, tick the wipe free space option, and run it, that will make any old data unrecoverable.

Obviously this will wipe all your data and programs, so backup first if there is anything important on there.

Dell machines often come with a method of creating the operating system cd's, called dell datasafe nowadays, but not sure about the xp era 6400's.

If anything goes wrong with the factory restore (ie it fails half way through), boot from the macrium cd, point it at the backup file on the external hard drive, and restore it to how it is now.

waterwatereverywhere

Thank you very much Closed, I will give that a go... fingers crossed!

NiftyDigits

waterwatereverywhere wrote: »

Hi again,

Just thought of a possible alternative - we used to have a Dell Desktop which we no longer have, but we did keep the discs which came with that.

Would the reinstallation CD for the desktop work OK to reinstall on our laptop?

The CD reads "operating system - reinstallation CD MS Windows XP Home Edition". Is there any way we could test it before running DBAN and removing everything?

Many thx.

Yes, the disc will work if it is in good condition. But if the service packs aren't up to date, then it's a minor pain to update.
Also, if there is a DELL folder on the C: drive, make a copy of it. The address will likely be C:\DELL The Drivers will likely be within.

You really should try the Factory Restore partition first or you might lose the use of the MediaDirect buttons if you use the disc to restore and happen to overwrite the partition.