Dell System Restore not available

Thanks for your reply. The Dell Diagnostics partition is available. I booted to it and ran the diagnostics on the hard drive; all the tests came back OK. Independent hard drive tests would not run, though, apparently because they could not address the drive.

I need to add: using the information at http://www.goodells.net, I was able to access the recovery partition but had to run recovery manually by changing to the c:\img directory and then typing c:\bin\recover to begin the restore process. The instructions at goodells.net doesn't indicate a way to use the Ghost command line switches using their method.

There is no needed data on this system, I just need to get the OS restored. The owners are out of touch for now and I do not have an OS disc for this system.

The system is not under warranty, so I didn't even contact Dell Support on this issue. I had the owner bring in his Dell Windows OS disc and I re-installed the OS, downloaded the drivers for the system and Dell Apps and have the computer up and running. I have not tried to access the recovery partition in fear of screwing up the new install. I would assume that since I didn't touch that partition during the re-install it is still corrupted. I don't have access to another computer with the same Dell master boot record to copy to this system as suggested at goodells.net, so don't know whether this would have worked or not. Anyway, I have cut my losses short and got the system up and running. Thanks for all your suggestions. I joined this organization because as I sought technical help on the internet, solutions offered from experts at this site came up over and over and many times were right on, although I didn't find the solution I wanted this time. Thanks again.

I had hoped to find a way to restore this system from the recovery partition. I found that solution at goodells.net but when I booted from that partition, I got the "internal error" from Symantec Ghost. I couldn't find a way to get past that error, perhaps that partition is corrupted too. mwecomputers comment was directly related to my desired solution, although I couldn't find a way to implement it. PUNKY's solution was good but pretty obvious; I would have done this if needed. Since the owner found his OS disc, re-installing from that was the quick and, in this case, a prudent solution. However, the recovery partition will, I'm sure, still be unavailable to the owner. From what I have read, Dell does not keep an original image as written to a computer when it leaves the factory.

Create or re-create recovery partition on Dell system is impossible unless you have Dell tools / utilities to do that. Not only you who wanted this, many does as well. Unfortunely, once this partition is messed or damaged, it is forever goner.

You might find some site or some people who said they can, but a detail procedure will never outlined and given out ... so I doubt that they just said but never happened unless they have right application tool to do that.

Of course, you can use other software to create the recovery partition such as Acronis or Norton Ghost, but it will be NOT the same way the recovery partition created in Dell Manufacturing.

I was really hoping that if I could just restore the master boot record, I could once again use the recovery partition and make it readily available to the owner.  Modifying the partition table allowed me to start the recovery but it then failed with error 36000.  As I gave it more thought, I realized that the partition itself was probably corrupted. That was, perhaps what caused the Symantec Ghost error. Perhaps, not.  As I was able to restore the OS using the Windows disc, whether or not the recovery partition is complete is moot as, practically speaking, getting the laptop up and running was the ultimate goal anyway. Thanks for your comments.