Dell XPS Laptop: How to boot the recovery partition
To boot the recovery partition on a Vista Dell XPS laptop, you need to press F8 as the laptop boots.
This will bring up the Vista boot menu, from which you can choose Recovery Console (usually the top option). Vista will then boot into a special mode, not unlike Safe Mode, and after logging in, will give you the option to run the Dell Recovery Tool. The recovery process is actually very fast – about 10 minutes in my case.
Unfortunately, this took me ages to find. Usually, laptops tell you how you can run a System Recovery when they boot, e.g. “Press F10 to run Recovery”, but the Dell XPS Vista laptops don’t do this at all. It certainly left me bewildered, until I stumbled upon the solution, via a Google search.
Danny Boy said,
15 July, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Thanks bro!! This helped!!
JW said,
5 August, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Thanks alot this works!! It is exactly what i needed.
Phil Wiffen said,
5 August, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Danny, JW, I’m glad it helped you guys out
Marc said,
18 August, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Tank you from Switzerland!
As you said “it took me ages to find”
Erin Page said,
1 February, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Yes bang your head with ctrl f11 all day.
Dude you rock thanks for saving my Sunday
Daniel said,
5 March, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Thank you so much! Tried some Google searching and everything else comes up with Ctrl + F11. Would have never thought to look in the F8 menu?
Thanks!
Jonathan said,
16 April, 2009 at 2:50 am
Thank you very much!
luis daniel said,
30 April, 2009 at 12:31 am
it doesn-t work… When I start in that mode, I go to d: tools / PCrestore.exe
starts the program, but the same message…
Its not logical to format C: when you-re into windows.
HOW CAN I BOOT THE PC WITH PC RESTORE ???????????????????
I DONT HAVE THE DISC.
JD said,
14 May, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Top answer, nice one matey!!!!!
Lyle said,
21 July, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for the help!
Milan from Slovakia said,
12 August, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I LOVE YOU, MAN !
As a very advanced power user with a lot of experience I have seen a lot of things.
- enabeling system restore in BIOS
-pressing various combinations of keys
-booting from floppy back in the days…
…but I would never think of going to boot menu just like that.
I was googling for almost an hour now to find this MF.
Thanks for the great post.
Milan
ballzdeep said,
26 August, 2009 at 9:28 pm
the above artical makes no sense what so ever ..all it does is tell you about what is preinstalled with dell computers. No solution here
Phil Wiffen said,
27 August, 2009 at 8:29 am
“ballzdeep” can you clarify please? The XPS uses a different boot recovery method compared to most other Dell laptops, which wasn’t immediately obvious (to me anyway).
ovidiu said,
28 August, 2009 at 5:25 pm
thank you so much for this post, i was finally able to fix my dell xps desktop all in one. thank you!