Windows 7: Accessing my restore partition

I have a dell Inspiron 1545 on Windows 7 home premium. It originally came with vista. Vista is in the recovery partition but I cannot access it I'd like to restore it before I sell it as I want to keep my purchased copy of Windows 7. I no longer have the 'advanced boot' option at the startup screen so, Erm help please.

Did you ever make Vista recovery disks?

Are you positive you still have the recovery partition?

If nothing else, you should be able to buy Vista recovery disks from Dell.

A screen shot of Windows Disk Management would help.

no i never made any vista recovery disks and i'm 100% sure the recovery partition is there also i refuse to buy recovery disks to give to someone when i sell it

If you can't lay your hands on a Dell recovery disc, you might want to try this Digital River link for a Windows Vista ISO and use your Dell OEM product key to activate the OS.

Dell Community

Your screenshot shows that the Dell recovery partition is in place, but the Dell OEM partition isn't, which will explain why you don't have the advanced boot option. The Dell OEM partition should be where the 110 MB unallocated space is.

Why would you refuse to buy a recovery disc? A computer without an operating system won't sell as well as one with an operating system.

That's exactly what I'll do. I'll give it a bash and report back. )

To be honest I just want shot of the laptop it's old and slow and I have 4 other machines. All I want is my Windows 7 off it so I can use it on my main machine.

Are you saying that nothing happens when you tap the F8 key during boot ??

Whs yeah that's what's happening. It just starts this horrible beeping. And I've tried holding it past that.

In that case, just boot into Windows 7 and choose the custom install option, and then delete all the partitions.

Providing you have a retail copy of Windows you can then use it on another computer providing you've removed it from the old computer.

Deleting all the partitions is as good a way as any to remove it.

If you have an OEM version of Windows, it's tied to the computer it's installed on and can't be transferred.

If you really want to go to town you can use Diskpart to clean the drive before you get rid of the computer.

Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

Hi Johnny -

The problem is that during reinstall somehow the 100mb System Reserved boot partition was deleted which took out the F8 Advanced Boot Options. We could help you restore that and Dell Recovery Partition - restoring F8 link.

However there is a way to add the Recovery partition to a Boot Menu at startup using EasyBCD (free Download at bottom of page - no name or email required) so that it will run and recover to factory condition.

Go to Control Panel>Folder Options>View and unhide Hidden and System files. Then in EasyBCD, choose the tab shown below then Browse to the boot.wim in the Recovery folder on recovery drive to add it to a Dual Boot menu, Save then reboot to Dual Boot menu to choose RAMdisk to start Recover.

click to enlarge