Windows 7: win 7 & vista recovery partition

hello , i bought a Dell computer a couple years ago
that had vista premium installed and i was
able to get a free Windows 7 disk from from dell
because it was right at the time win 7 was
introduced .

anyway the vista recovery partition is still on the drive
and was wanting to know how to revert the computer
back to the way it left factory .

sense i installed 7 it doesn't have the restore option
on boot up it wants to reboot Windows 7 instead of from the
partition that vista is on .



i thought about formatting the c: partition but don't
know if that would bring back restore options from the
other vista partition .

so is vista still able to be reinstalled or is it lost
for good ?

any advice is appreciated .

We can give you better advice if you post a screenshot of your expanded disk management layout as it will show what you still have on your hard drive.

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

here's disk partitions .

By gocos at 2011-12-08

i guess this what your asking for .

What happend is he following: The Vista recovery partition depended on the Vista bootmgr which was on the Vista C: partition. Since you loaded Windows 7 into that partition, the recovery partition is now orphaned and cannot be accessed.

What you can do is fix the Windows 7 bootmgr to include the recovery partition. For that you can use EasyBCD

Or, you ask Dell to send you a Vista installation disk which they usually do for a small S&H charge.

^^^ any instructions on how this is done ?

bump

You don't have to use EasyBCD if you don't want to, Windows BCDEdit will do the job, as this tutorial shows.

BCDEDIT - How to Use

You should have received either or both Vista Recovery Disks and Vista Reinstallation DVD with a Dell in that time period as they only recently stopped supplying either except by special request. That is the way to restore it now.

You can try marking Recovery partition Active to see if it will start at reboot or using hotkey: Partition - Mark as Active (Method Two)

May I ask why you want Vista instead of Windows 7 which cannot be used on any other machine but that one? Maybe we can help you resolve issues since this is a Windows 7 forum.

thx for the reply's everyone, the reason i want to get the partition working again is to
the real reason is that when i installed 7 it clean installed on the drive and i ended up searching
for all the missing programs and drivers for the computer so im thinking that if i reinstall factory all original drivers
then update with win 7 instead all original drivers will be there and make the cpu run smother .

What drivers are still missing or causing problems? Windows 7 is driver-complete in the installer, with newer arriving quickly via Optional Windows Updates.

So if you changed out a bunch of drivers after clean reintall you may have problems because you shouldn't change the drivers given by Windows 7 installer and optional Windows Updates unless there are performance reasons for doing so.

You'll have all drivers when you Factory Recover but you'll also have all of the preinstalled factory bloatware which isn't nearly as clean an install as you did. But you can Clean up factory bloatware
using these tips.

Or you can try the clean reinstall again following these steps to get a perfect reinstall based on hundreds we've helped with here: Reinstalling Windows 7