My sister is having a few problems with her Dell Inspiron laptop. She wants to restore the laptop back to factory settings so that there's no personal data on there (it's all been backed up). It asks for an installation CD that she no longer has (not sure she ever had). Does she need the CD? Any advice on how to do this?
You could just format the drive (assuming the OS is on a separate partition)
Dell usually stick a recovery partition on there with the operating system etc ready to restore from there.
How do you do that?
You don't mention the OS, so you will have to Google the specifics, but look for which key (F8 on my wife's Vista box) will give you the option to boot into Safe Mode etc. There should be an option to go into Recovery Manager or similar. Follow the instructions to restore to factory defaults.
Beware, though, that doing this may not wipe the data drive if the laptop has a separate drive (not partion) for data.
I've just done a factory reset on said Vista box and the data was still there. Good for what we wanted (yes, it was backed up!) but perhaps not for your purposes.
If you just want to dispose of the laptop, look for an application which will overwrite the whole drive or drives to a decent industry or government standard. Last time I did this there was a free application or two to do this. Can't vouch for the results... Depends what you want to do with the box: if you're just going to send it to the tip you could put it through a degaussing machine if you have access to one.
If its a Dell , you should be able to restore everything to the original state just by the recovery option that dells have. If this was a few years ago id be able to tell ya of the top of my head but since I have had a mac I can't remember. Try searching on youtube for something like ' ''recovering a dell computer ''. You should be able to do that without using the OS support functions. Thats one thing that are good with Dell machines.
It's a dell inspiron with windows 7.
There's a problem with potential malware and then may want to sell it.
I had an Inspiron also, Try this used to work for me and a few we got in the shop.
Turn on the computer, after the Dell logo press F8 key repeatedly until the
Advanced Boot Options menu (Advanced Startup Options).
In Advanced Boot Options, highlight Repair Your Computer and press Enter.
Click Next and logon to the administrator account in the computer.
Click Dell DataSafe Restore and Emergency Backup and DataSafe Options.
Choose Restore without preserving new or changed file. Click Next to continue.
Choose Yes and click Next to continue.
Progress status will appear. Click Restart to initiate the restoration process
Thanks all sorted.
Not a problem 🙂