Dell Recovery partition will not boot.

[SoundTheSurrender]

I installed Vista but want to revert back to Windows XP. I have no discs and the partition recovery doesn't load anymore (Ctrl + F11).

The partition is still there but I guess Vista overrided it and I cannot recover back to XP.

Any ideas??

 

[LS]

Try Dsrfix. It worked for me.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

hmm, it requires true dos... I don't have a floppy drive because its a laptop.

 

[BladeVenom]

If your laptop is still under warranty, get Dell to send you the recovery disks. If not I think you can buy a set from them for like $10.

 

[bruceb]

Please read the entire directions as listed below for DSRFIX:

How Do I Boot to DOS?

The typical way to boot to real DOS is with a DOS boot floppy. If your system does not have a floppy drive, however, booting from a bootable CD or a bootable flash drive are suitable alternatives.
To prepare for the following steps, download the dsrfix.zip archive file and extract dsrfix.com or dsrfixcd.iso.
You may optionally wish to include ptedit.exe from ptedit.zip.

As you can see, the DSRFIX.ZIP contains a file called DSRFIXCD.ISO which you burn to a cd with something like Nero or Roxio
This creates a Bootable CD which can then be used just like the Floppy Version of the program