# Help needed on DELL RECOVERY



## katy (Feb 15, 2010)

I'm currently trying to survive with an Optiplex 760 that has supposedly been refurbished. Never did receive the disks for the Win 7, OS that was to be part of the package.

Does anyone know exactly how the directory for OS, should be set up ? There are 2 folders of My Documents, 2 Downloads, and duplicate Desktops, one of each folder states "access denied" . Any idea how this could be ?

It appears to me that the Recovery files might be in an unallocated area of C:, if so would the path simply be C:\Recovery ?

We had a momentary power outage a few days ago and my system rebooted itself or tried and failed. During an attempt to Restore to an earlier date, it went through most of the process, then stated "fatal error".
Eventually it gave me a slightly altered Desktop but eventually was usable and colors returned to normal. 

After running AVG & Malware Bytes, there was a list of maybe 30 LOCKED files, no explanation. Any suggestions ? Anyone else have Dell Refurbished units and experienced similar problems ?


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

Usually there is a hidden and completely separate partition with the windows restore/reinstall files. Though who knows anymore. Havent used any windows newer than XP. My HP computer came used with XP installed and a separate partition with XP restore files. I dont remember now, but think HP intended there was some key to push during post to start restore main windows partition from the hidden second partition. I made a third partition using GParted, then installed Puppy Linux on third partition and used GRUB boot manager. It found XP, the hidden XP restore partition, and of course Puppy partition which has lions share of the hard drive. So if I wanted to restore XP, I would just chose the XP restore partition to boot from GRUB menu. Though probably pushing the magic key during post would still work if I remembered what it was.

By way the restore option from second partition goes away if by chance the hard drive goes to hard drive heaven. So always good plan to make copy of any partition you want to save to either dvd or to a dedicated usb storage hard drive. Lot ghosting software out there, some free, though I used a Puppy live cd and used dd command to make copy to another hard drive. I dont remember exact command line options I used with dd anymore, would have to look it up. But it worked surprisingly well. For large partition, imagine a modern third party ghosting software would be faster.


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## Kung (Jan 19, 2004)

HermitJohn said:


> Usually there is a hidden and completely separate partition with the windows restore/reinstall files.


This. Dell (as well as most companies) usually makes its own recovery partition.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

It's possible that a refurbished PC will have a new non-vendor hard drive with no recovery partition. In that case simply install Windows 7 from any install DVD. Just boot from the DVD, reformat the drive, then install fresh.

Another alternative might be to simply upgrade to Windows 10. Your PC should work fine with Windows 10 and it will most likely clear-up your configuration problems.


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## JohnP (Sep 1, 2010)

Seems like dells used to use the F8 key to activate recovery but it seems to be hold Ctrl key and hit F11 to activate it on the newer ones. Try those while it boots. If nothing happens, the refurbisher probably just put straight win on it rather than a true dell system install.


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## chuckhole (Mar 2, 2006)

katy said:


> I'm currently trying to survive with an Optiplex 760 that has supposedly been refurbished. Never did receive the disks for the Win 7, OS that was to be part of the package.
> 
> Does anyone know exactly how the directory for OS, should be set up ? There are 2 folders of My Documents, 2 Downloads, and duplicate Desktops, one of each folder states "access denied" . Any idea how this could be ?
> 
> ...


It sounds like the security on those file/folders has become corrupt. If you are logged on as an Administrator on the machine, you can take ownership of the files/folders and reset the security.

Access Denied permissions are typical for folders created by other user accounts. When you have multiple users on a computer, the user profile folders such as My Documents, Download, etc. get set with permissions for that user. By default, they are denied to other users on that computer.

If this is a "refurbished" computer, the old user accounts were not cleaned up. An OptiPlex is typically a business line of computers for Dell. If this came from a business, then it was likely joined to a business Active Directory Domain and has security specific to that business. All of this needs to be cleaned up.

Open My Computer and right-click on one of the "Access Denied" folders and select Properties.
Select the Security tab.
Click on Advanced at the bottom of the window.
Select the Owner tab.
In the Change Owner to window, select your logon name.
Apply this to the files and subfolders take ownership of the files, folders and subfolders.
Once your are the owner of the files, you can change the security to add your user account with permissions. Make them Full Control.
The difference between Full Control and Modify permissions is that users assigned with Full Control permissions can make security changes.

Then go to Control Panel and open the User Accounts category.
Select Manage User Accounts.
Remove all of the old accounts that are not going to be used by you.

Open My Computer.
Go to the C:\Users folder.
Here, you will see the folders created for each user that has logged on to that computer.
Delete the folders you are not familiar with. They would be users created by the previous owners.
DO NOT delete the Administrator or Public folders. These are default folders created with the Windows installation.


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## katy (Feb 15, 2010)

Thank you, chuckhole. It sounds like a plan, for next week. thank you.


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