I recently had to restore a notebook computer back to the original image as shipped from the factory. There are two ways to go about this: manually or using the Dell System Restore partition. Manual reload can take hours/days. The DSR recovery is a breeze...unless the DSR partition has become unbootable.

The normal way to start DSR is to hit CTRL+F11 as soon as you see the F2/F12 prompt when the notebook boots. If it does not recognize CTRL+F11 your Dell-provided master boot record has been changed. When this happens there is a tool called DSRFix that can fix this problem for you. If it works then you're off to the races.

If it doesn't work, as in my case (complained the DSR partition was not valid FAT32) you' have a lot of work to do, but it can be recovered.

The basic idea is to boot from DOS (Win98) and run the recover command in the DSR partition to restore the Windows image. As simple as that sounds, take a notebook with no diskette drive and add to that the fact that Win98 will not recognize the DSR FAT32 partition and it gets really complicated really fast. My approach is to create a Win98 USB boot drive that contains the files from the DSR partition. There is no way around this that I could find (and I worked on it for two days).

You'll need:

• an external disk enclosure and disk drive of the same type as what's in your notebook (20GB or larger is best)
• a working computer with a CD writer, internet access, and ISO-writing software
• a Windows 98 SE boot diskette
• Nero or similar software to create a DOS-boot CD
• Knoppix bootable CD (Linux on a CD)

1. Use Nero to create a DOS bootable CD using the Win98 boot diskette
2. Replace the notebook's disk with the one in the USB enclosure
3. Boot the notebook from the Win98 Boot CD
4. Format the spare disk for FAT32
5. SYS C: to make the spare disk that you just installed bootable
6. Reinstall the notebook's original drive
7. Install your spare disk in the USB enclosure and connect it to the working computer
8. Download DSRFix and PTEDIT and copy to the USB disk
9. Connect the USB disk to the notebook
10. Boot the notebook from the USB disk
11. Use PTEDIT to change the partition type for the DSR partition from 0xDB to 0x0B
12. Boot the notebook from the Knoppix CD
13. Mount the DSR partition (usually something like /dev/hda3)
14. Copy the entire contents of the DSR partition to the USB disk
15. Delete autoexec.bat from the USB disk
16. Boot the notebook from the USB disk
17. run \bin\recover
18. select the image file in \img\*.GHO
19. Restore to disk 2, partition 2
20. Start the restore