How to make Dell laptop recovery disks?

[balloonshark]

I just picked up one of these to play around with. http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-11-3162-laptop/pd

How is Dell doing their recovery disks on these new machines? It has a 450MB recovery partition. There is also an operating system download in the
Drivers, Manuals & Support on Dells site. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/OSISO Is this like a factory image that will restore everything to the way it was before being powered on? Or is this just an OS image customized to work with Dell minus drivers and software?

AFAIK it doesn't have recovery media creation software installed. I see some backup apps on Dell's site but I don't see any for Windows 10. I just want to be able to restore this machine if I ever sell it.

For some reason I think I screwed up by not imaging the computer with Macrium Reflect when I first powered it on.

 

[pitz]

Do you have the machine still intact? If so, take the disk, boot it up on Linux with a boot stick or attach it to a machine, and execute the following command (with cwd = somewhere you can store the image)

dd if=/dev/sdX of=New_Dell_Laptop_Image.img bs=1M count=500

(ie: copy the first 500 megabytes of the disk to the image file).

Write New_Dell_Laptop_Image.img to a CD-ROM or something with your burning software or cdrecord or copy to a USB stick. Tuck away. Restore the image to the first 500megabytes of the disk when you end up selling it (preferably after you've wiped the disk through either its secure erase function, or over-writing with zeros).

BTW, "500" should be large enough so that it encompasses the hidden restore partition. Use gdisk (for GPT) or fdisk (for MBR if its still using MBR) to determine just how big "500" needs to be.

 

[balloonshark]

Thanks for your reply. The machine is new. I only booted it up and didn't enter any personal details. I disabled a few OS nuisances during and after install. I also made a Macrium Reflect image but it won't take it back to brand new state.

The machine has 4 partitions so it's GPT/uefi. What would imaging, wiping and then restoring the first 500MB do? Would it just restore the 3 smaller partitions (one of which is the dell recovery partition) and that would have all the information needed to restore the system to a like new unbooted state?

I'm really kicking myself for not imaging before first boot. I wasn't sure how to boot to the usb stick one this machine plus my searching showed how to make recovery disks albeit not for this particular model or preinstalled windows 10 models. More searching seems to point to imaging using Windows back up utility which doesn't really help me.

 

[Kaido]

I haven't tried this on a Dell myself, but try setting up a USB stick using the Win10 MCT here: (scroll down to download)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

I'm not sure if the BIOS SLIC stuff talks to MCT or not. I've restored Win10 on other machines successfully (like Atom boxes), not sure if it'd work on a modern Dell though. Might want to test it on a spare drive. fwiw, Win10 has a built-in restore system, so as long as you can boot into Windows, you can do a full restore right from the hard drive.

 

[balloonshark]

I haven't tried this on a Dell myself, but try setting up a USB stick using the Win10 MCT here: (scroll down to download)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

I'm not sure if the BIOS SLIC stuff talks to MCT or not. I've restored Win10 on other machines successfully (like Atom boxes), not sure if it'd work on a modern Dell though. Might want to test it on a spare drive. fwiw, Win10 has a built-in restore system, so as long as you can boot into Windows, you can do a full restore right from the hard drive.

Thank you. I'm mainly worried about all the pre-installed dell stuff. This is my first laptop so I'm not sure what is or isn't needed for it to function properly. The dell support guy I spoke with really didn't know if their OS file was just a dell tweaked OS or if it came with dell programs and necessary drivers. It's not easy communicating with Indian techs and they want you off the phone asap .

If it were up to me I would do a clean install and install the drivers without all the extra junk. With a slow processor and 2GB ram I need all the help I can get. Or I could just install linux.