Up until now, my personal machine has never been newer than XP. I also don't think I've ever had a Dell that provided recovery options from a recovery partition on the hard drive - they always used an OS disc, drivers CD, etc. I now have a secondhand Inspiron 1318 (Vista) and an Inspiron 15 (N5040 Win7) and I'm trying to decide which one to keep.
On the 1318, the guy I got it from bought a retail Win7 package to upgrade it but I didn't buy the OS from him. He had formatted the hard drive (so there was no recovery partition remaining) and didn't keep the original discs. So I got a Dell Vista OS CD for the reinstall. My question - if I also found a 1318 with the recovery partition intact, would cloning the drive allow me to return the drive to factory condition with the recovery partition intact (for future recovery) and also allow me to make a set of system recovery discs?
On the N5040, the recovery partition was still present along with some leftover music and documents from the original owner. I first created a set of recovery disks with the included utility and then used F8 to restore it to factory condition from the recovery partition. My question - if I have to use, at some point in the future, the recovery DVDs I made, do they also restore it to factory condition? Or do they include any of the data from the original owner that was present when they were made, whether settings, passwords, files, etc.?
Thanks in advance for any help.
