Hi (and thanks in advance!)
I'm having real trouble in restoring my Dell Inspiron 530 to factory settings. I've done this before on other machines with ease, but this one is proving really difficult. I'm running Windows Vista. Reason for reformatting is the machine is starting to run really slowly. Virus checks etc show nothing so I think it's just time for a cleanup.
I've looked through the Dell forums and other sites, but no joy.
To summarise what I've tried;
- F8 and Cntrl F11 during startup do not work. I only have option of F2 (Setup) and F12 (Boot Menu)
F2 is obviously no use. F12 presents option of SATA-O, Bootable Add-In Cards or Utility Partition. I still have the recovery set up on a partition on my hard drive (including the .wim file) so expected this to work through Utility Partition, but doesn't give the option anywhere to start up through the recovery, just the options of 'test memory, testing system - I tried reinstalling Vista but the system runs really slowly still (despite cleaning out the windows.old files)
- I tried booting the system from the Vista DVD and going through the recovery process but it can't seem to find any wim files (even tried putting the wim file on a USB stick and trying to force it to find it that way - no joy)
- I tried running the PCRestore application from the Recovery partition on my hard drive but received the error 'Access to \Tools\dp.sc' which I believe is due to it not being possible to run this directly through Windows?
I have a Vista DVD, Dell Drivers & Utility Disk, but nothing labelled as a 'recovery disk' (I never received one originally and had assumed that it could be done through startup!)
The opening screen (with the dell logo) shows BIOS Revision 1.0.13 in case this is relevant.
Beyond this, I'm lost. How can I reformat the machine to the 'out of the box' state?
Any assistance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Sam.