I have a dell inspirion 14 z ,I installed win 7 ultimate over the factory home edition , is there a way to get BACK the factory home edition back on ,I NEED to sell this laptop with out the win 7 ultimate Go to the manuf. site and look up the instructions for doing a Factory Restore from the hidden restore partition.The partition was deleted when ultimate was installed so any of the recovery disks do not workThe partition does NOT get deleted when an OS is installed...unless you really mucked around in there...go check the instructions...I did go to dell and followed instructions but the fix goes back to ultimate so I MADE a muck up this is the windows I get following the instuctions SYS recovery options start up repair - sytem resore- system image recovery- windows mem diagnostics- command prompt. sys image can not find system image if I use the back up disk it will not read itThen you did somehow manage to wipe the recovery partition...
If it were me i'd wipe the HDD and sell it as is.You could always contact Dell and get them to send you a disk with your OS on it. It's usually a nominal fee + shipping.
when I first got this laptop I did the back up with four CD's is that the os?No...it's is all the files that needed for the recovery...if the recovery partition has been messed with they won't work...hence the error message.