Is it possible to access the “restore partition” on a Dell Inspiron after a failed “Windows XP” restore?
Friend tried to use the Windows system restore, he claims that it was going along fine and prompted him to reboot and then it wouldn’t reboot to Windows. It appears the entire OS partition is corrupted but the Dell System Diagnostic and restore partitions still seem to be intact. I can get into the diagnostics at boot time but the “ctrl-F11” trick doesn’t work here.
I’ve checked Dell’s website for this system and it doesn’t appear there are any drivers specific to the drive controller. I booted from a CD into the recovery console and ran FIXMBR but it tells me that the partition information is either invalid or written by other partition manager software. I’ve booted with UBCD4Win and it is also unable to read the Windows partition.
The reason the friend tried the Windows restore was a virus, not sure which, I only had a brief look at it before he did this and I had suspected possible root kit type (various reasons). But he was in a hurry and I had other obligations at the time so he took it to a local chain store and they confirmed it had a virus and gave him cost estimate to repair which he declined and took the laptop back home and tried the system rollback.
Anyway is there some way to use Dell’s system restore partition after a fubar like this?
Thanks
