Basically, I have a Dell Laptop which came in with pre-installed Win7. The computer had a built-in recovery media: I could access this by pressing F8 on startup and the boot options menu, where you can select "Repair your computer", "Safe Mode", etc...
I installed Win8 onto this laptop and now, when I press F8 on startup, I cannot access the boot options menu. The recovery media is still on my hard drive taking up about 50gb, but I cannot access it as it's a protected storage. I know that Win8 has a very different safe mode option and accessing it is done differently, but I want to restore my laptop back to Win7 factory installed from the recovery media.
Any ideas how I could access it?
Answer
Windows 8 has overwritten the special boot-sector that Dell uses to provide access (by F8) to the recovery partition.
You might be able fix things byt doing the following:
Get a copy of GPartedMagic which is a Linux LiveCD with the GParted tool on it.
It comes in USB and CD versions, either one will work.
Boot it, go into GParted and take a look at the partition info.
You will see an extra partition of some 30 to 50 GB (varies a bit depending on model).
Set this partition to be the Active Partition and commit the change to disk.
Now try to boot the laptop normally.
With a bit of luck it will go straight into the recovery partition.
If this doesn't work you will have to contact Dell Technical Support directly.
They have a recovery method to restore the boot-sector, but as far as I know you can't download it from their web-site yourself.
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