Dell Recovery Drive (D:\)

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Vista Home Premium installed on it, however recently I've been getting the blue screen of death quite a bit. I would preferrably want to reinstall Vista completely however my DVD/CD drive only reads CDs now for some reason (no longer reads DVDs), so I cannot use the Vista OEM DVD that came with the laptop. :-(

I am aware there is a System Restore feature in vista that may fix this problem, however preferrably I'd like to wipe everything of my hard drive and start again as I've got lots of junk etc. that's not needed.

I've noticed that my hard drive has a partition called RECOVERY (D:\), although I'm not exactly sure what it's for. Could this be a possible solution to my problem?

Can anyone help please?

Thanks
==
ed

 

the recovery partition is used to essentially reinstall Windows to its factory settings. so basically it goes back to the way you 1st got it from Dell.

this info may help you out:
http://support.dell.com/support/top...6E85929D3A3411DC8BF6F3187AA32B03&docid=181316

 

The 6400 doesn't do it the same way as mentioned on the link above (at least the UK version doesn't).

The way I did it was:

1. While windows boots press F8 to get into the boot options menu
2. Select the first option on the list, something like repair installation.
3. Follow instructions on screen, select the option that says to restore from recovery partition.

Sorry about the vague description but it really is self explanatory once you get into the boot menu.

 

this is a pretty standard thing on all laptops now a days. lenovo has the same deal only thing is that they keep this recovery partition hidden so the avg user wont be able to tamper with it

 

Found the knowledge base link, this explains things better:

http://support.dell.com/support/top...d=28C0548D825EB65DE040A68F5B2865A8&doclang=en