Accidentally installed windows 7 on my Recovery Partition D:\

SIW2 said:

If factory.wim is large - 3gb or so - then that is the installation wim.

You are looking for the preinstallation wim - it is probably under 200mb.

It is possible you may have overwritten it - look in the folder recovery\{longnumber} as well.

I can't find it, it must be gone. I guess if it is gone then I would be willing to get rid of D:. Would getting rid of it damage my system? Would I have to reformat the system again? As well would simply formatting or deleting D: get rid of all the residues of the windows 7 I installed on it, including from boot files?

LOL.

Dell used to put the recovery.wim or windowsre.wim in the recovery folder.

You don't need it to restore - it just provides an easy gui.

You can apply the factory.wim to the partition with imagex or any number of similar apps.

We can have a quick look for it by running this - then post up the text file it produces:

unzip it - then rt click and run as admin on findwims.cmd

findwims-V2.zip

SIW2 said:

LOL.

Dell used to put the recovery.wim or windowsre.wim in the recovery folder.

You don't need it to restore - it just provides an easy gui.

You can apply the factory.wim to the partition with imagex or any number of similar apps.

Can you be more specific about what steps I should take? As well, even if I completely restored the factory configuration, would traces of the Windows 7 on D: still be in the partition or my boot files?

If you run the .cmd file I posted above -it will find any wims on C or D drive.

If you have the del bootable wim we can add it to the boot menu .

If you don't have it - then you can still apply the image from the factory.wim to back to your drive - but you will need to use a different app. to do the applying.

findwims-V2.zip

After we have organised your restore method - then we can delete anything you don't need from D partition

SIW2 said:

LOL.

Dell used to put the recovery.wim or windowsre.wim in the recovery folder.

You don't need it to restore - it just provides an easy gui.

You can apply the factory.wim to the partition with imagex or any number of similar apps.

We can have a quick look for it by running this - then post up the text file it produces:

unzip it - then rt click and run as admin on findwims.cmd

findwims-V2.zip

Hi, don't quite understand what you mean. It doesn't show any wim files. Should I put the program in a certain folder?

What doesn't show any wim files?

Rt click and run as admin on findwims.cmd.

That will produce a text file called foundwims.txt.

If you have a wim on drive C or drive D - it will be listed in the foudwims.txt file.

SIW2 said:

What doesn't show any wim files?

Rt click and run as admin on findwims.cmd.

That will produce a text file called foundwims.txt.

If you have a wim on drive C or drive D - it will be listed in the foudwims.txt file.

Do you mean opening up the findwims zip file and highlighting and right clicking findwims.cmd? I tried to do this, but it never gave me the option to run as admin. The only options it gave me are open, cut, copy, delete, properties.

Maybe there are no files other than factory.wim?

You will only find out by looking - that .cmd file will do the job.

Strange you don't get the option to run as admin .

You are the administrator on that machine ?

Actually - you shouldn't need to run it as admin - just dble click the .cmd file, or rt click it and select open - works fine for me.

It may be easier if you ever decide to restore to factory condition to simply order the Recovery Disks from Dell.

Since you used the Dell Win7 Reinstallation DVD to clean reinstall, it seems you want the cleaner installation without the preinstalled bloatware anyway. If this is the case, here's how to recover both the System boot files and the HD disk space from D into C

Boot free Partition Wizard bootable CD, right click C, select Modify>Set to Active, click OK.

Next click on the Disk # to highlight it, from Disk tab select Rebuild MBR, Apply both steps, reboot.

If Win7 doesn't start boot into the Win7 DVD Repair console to run Startup Repair up to 3 Separate Times with reboots to write the System boot files to the Active partition.

Once Win7 starts and holds the System Active Boot flags, boot PW CD, rightclick on D, select Delete, OK.

Next rightclick on C, select Resize, slide the left border to the left to take up the space deleted on D, OK, Apply both steps.

If you'd prefer to reinstall reclaiming both C and D, follow these steps to Clean Reinstall Windows 7 Factory OEM