Last week a friend of mine came up with his old Dell Mini which was all crashed and almost dead. It was running Windows 7 Home version and one fine day, it just crashed without any warning or error. There were two visible partitions on the drive and it was all running fine previously.

First step I did was to try the restore mode which is available for Dell systems. After pressing F8, I was able to see the repair Computer option. Under most cases it has been found that the Dell recover Manager is able to repair all major faults with this fail safe process. But sometimes this process fails as well. It can be due to many reasons – may be you have deleted the recovery partition unknowingly as you needed more space to store application or games. Sometimes the errors are not detectable which makes it tougher to troubleshoot the problem.

You should only try this if you are unable to boot into safe mode and Dell recovery method fails as well. You can also try booting with Ubuntu/Linux live disk and save the important files to USB drive or external hard drive.

Check for Valid Dell Recovery Partition

Before we proceed with the Recovery process, you should check that the recovery partition is still intact.

1. Insert Windows 7 disk and boot from it.
2. Select “Repair” from the Boot menu
3. Wait till you see “use recovery tools“
4. After initial process select “Command Prompt” option
5. You should now see the following command line – “X:\Sources“
6. Now type “D:”
7. Write “dir” and press Enter
8. Match this message – “Volume in drive D is RECOVERY”
9. Now type “Diskpart“
10. Find the Disk number associated with the largest volume
11. Now type “Select disk X” where X is the partition number
12. Now again type “list partitions“
13. Now you will see that there are three partitions -
14. partition 1: 8-100mb || partition 2: 8-12 GB || partition 3: the largest size
15. Write “select partition Y” where Y is the name of the largest partition

Erase the Root Partition Data

You will have to now erase all data inside this root partition. We must use this step to reset the drive partition to Dell Recovery factory defaults.

1. Type “format” and press Enter
2. This will erase all data from your root partition

Restore Image from Dell Recovery Partition

This is only half the task done. We have successfully erased all data from the root partition and it is all blank now. We now need to connect to the Recovery Partition and apply Dell Restore Image to the root partition.

1. Type Exit to move out of “Diskpart”
2. Make sure your command prompt shows this – “X:\Sources“
3. Get inside the recovery partition by typing “D:“
4. Enter “dir“
5. Make sure you get the following message – “Volume in drive D is RECOVERY“
6. Now exactly type the following command – “D:\>imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\“
7. This will restore your Windows 7 Dell Recovery Partition mage to C:
8. Type Exit and restart

This method work perfectly for Dell Inspiron 1545 recovery partition issues. You should now be able to log into your Windows 7 in normal mode now. If you are still having problems you can post your screenshot in the comment section. We will try our best to find a solution for it.

IMPORTANT: Before you proceed I would like to let you know that not a single byte of data will be available in your system after completing this process. I cannot be held responsible for any data loss. The hard drive, BIOS setting and almost everything will be set to factory defaults. So, if you have any data which is of some importance, try taking a back up.