Jamie Fehr

My dad cannot seem to handle the near infinite power of the modern portable computer or maybe it’s that Microsoft Windows isn’t very good or maybe it’s that there’s an evil pixie hiding inside his laptop that causes it to have problems but at any rate he seems to be pretty lost without someone there to babysit his laptop. So when I got back from my recent travels he was very quick to request my assistance with an Internet Explorer problem he was having.

So I asked him to demonstrate for me the problem and when I saw it I was completely weirded out. Internet Explorer would only load the homepage and that was it. There was no web browsing to be done from that computer and after an hour of playing around on the laptop I had made no progress so my dad suggested doing something that seemed very logical to him and that was to call a Dell Support Rep.

We made the call and after another two hours of toying around with the laptop we had still made no progress and the general consensus was that it was time to wipe the hard drive and start over.

My dad got out all the pertinent discs and an external hard drive and I got busy with making backups of all his information and once I was confident that all data had been properly copied off the hard disk I proceeded to insert a disc from Dell labeled Windows XP Reinstallation into the tray.

I restarted the computer and booted from the disc.

About an hour later I had a baby laptop that needed drivers and Microsoft Office before it could grow into a fully functional member of the office society so I then proceeded to insert another disc labeled Drivers and Utilities into the CD tray. It was to no avail. The drivers that shipped with the laptop couldn’t get the video or the network adapters to function. What now? My logic dictated that a brief check of the Dell support site might be able to lead me to the answers that I was looking for.

I did indeed find the answer I was looking for in there support site, apparently most Dell computers including the one I was working on come with something called Dell System Restore and with that utility it’s possible to bring your computer back to it’s original factory settings in less than 10 minutes.

So there I was a good four and a half hours into the restore process discovering that it could have gone much quicker if I only had dug a little deeper I would have been able to save myself a whole bunch of time and sanity, but such is life and hindsight is always 20-20, all I needed to do was was push CTRL+F11 during the Dell screen on startup and the utility would start. That is it would start if I hadn’t formatted the utility out of the hard drive during the last system restore attempt.

Great.

I went back to google. Surely I can’t be the only person thats done this I thought to myself and I started search for for a ghost recovery software and I came across this, I downloaded my very own copy burned it to a disk and followed some instructions I found online but it was to no avail. The linux tools I was using couldn’t decompress and restore a Norton Ghost image file.

Back to square 1. I did some more digging and I came across few more pages describing exactly the situation I was in and that taunted me with brief mentionings of solutions but it wasn’t until I stumbled across step-by-step instructions at Goodells.net that I really was able to make things fly.

So there you have it, a not very entertaining story about my laptop restore experience. I’ll be honest with you, I only wrote it so that I could get all these links somewhere. I think they might be useful again someday.