[Coco] OT: Recovery Disc set for Dell Inspiron 15 3520...

[Salvador Garcia]

I myself have two DELL laptops, a Vostro 1500 (back from 2007ish) and an Inspiron 11 that we bought late last year. The Vostro came with an XP recovery CD which I needed to restore the laptop to factory settings, but found that the CD was cracked. I went on eBay and found some for sale for $10.

On doing further research, I found out that all recovery CDs for that specific generation of DELL computers were the same, only varying as XP SP1 came out then SP2 and subsequently SP3, Since my ex-employer bought a bunch of desktops from DELL at the turn of the century and most are living happily ever after in some landfill, I took one of the recovery CDs and used that to reinstall a fully functional Win XP on the Vostro. (Since then it got updated to Win 7 then to Win 10). Something that stopped working was the SD card reader. I hardly ever use it, so not sure what happened there.

My Inspiron 11 did not come with any discs, so I suspect that it has a hidden partition. I m not particularly a DELL fan, but their laptops met our needs and we ended buying from them 2 of the 3 times that we have needed a laptop.

Salvador


 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, Aug 27, 2015 11:27 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] OT: Recovery Disc set for Dell Inspiron 15 3520...


Well, in any event I ordered a set of discs as recommended by Tom Seagrove. 
So,
I should be all set.

I intend to write a scathing letter to Dell Corporate
tomorrow and PC World 
Magazine about the lack of customer service. I've bought
a lot of systems 
from Dell, both directly, used on eBay, and caused others in
my family to 
buy Dell. I really expected to be treated better by them. They
recently 
cancelled my credit line, and this is the last straw. My next system
will be 
a Gateway or Lenovo.

-[ Al ]-

-----Original Message----- 
From:
Stephen H. Fischer

Hi,

I never thought that you had a W10 computer.

You got
me looking at the hard drive of my Sony W7 laptop.

There are two unusual
partitions, one is just like the Windows 7 System 
Repair Disk I had sitting in
my active HTPC and needed it to use often 
because I had messed up the booting
between XP, W7 and W10. That computer's 
power supply failed and I had to swap
in the backup HTPC. New PS to be 
installed tomorrow.

Reading the "decrypt.cmd"
script I found http://wimlib.net/ and 
"oscdimg.exe", the latter is used by the
script to build the ".iso" and the 
former to get the WIM files ready. Both are
included in the download file.

It appears using these tools they can be used
for Vista and above systems to 
create the ".iso" like you wish from the ".wim"
files you have.

Understanding the exact options you need for wimlib and oscdimg
was not part 
of my exercise.

The ".wim" files I saw being created as one step
in the process have been 
deleted from the USB flash drive I used.

SHF


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