Great wealth of information regarding Dell’s PC Restore Partition was shown to me and I looked it over.  Excellent site with information.  Here’s the link:  http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm

A few excerpts from the site…

Preface
This page discusses how to fix the Dell System Restore (DSR) feature. The term “restore” has a somewhat fuzzy definition, and users sometimes ambiguously use “restore XP” when they really mean “reinstall XP”. I think it would be helpful here to make that distinction.

The term ‘restore’ should be taken as meaning to return to a previously saved or stored state. A prerequisite here is that a backup must have been previously saved to which you can return. In contrast, ‘reinstall’ should mean the process of installing XP again from an installation CD, just as would be done if the hard disk partition did not previously have any operating system. ‘Install’ and ‘reinstall’ are functionally the same thing–whether or not the partition previously had XP installed is not really relevant when the process will eliminate any previous installation and install XP anew.

In the case of Dell’s “PC-Restore by Symantec” feature, Dell has supplied the user with a backup image made at the factory, and this backup is stored in the DSR partition. It is this backup that is restored from when the Ctrl+F11 keys are pressed.

A backup image must exist before you can restore from it. If Dell did not ship your computer with a DSR partition, you cannot restore. If you have deleted the DSR partition, you cannot restore. In these cases, you may still reinstall if you have the reinstallation media, but that is a different topic than what is being covered here. If a DSR partition does not exist, you cannot create one and hope a backup image will magically appear in it.

If Dell shipped your computer with a DSR partition and it has not been deleted, then you should have the backup image to restore from–although you might not always be able to get to it. That’s what this page is about: re-enabling your ability to use Dell’s backup image.

You can find more information here:  http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm


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