Hello,
I hope I'm in the correct place.
Here's my story. A user has a new Dell Inspiron 660s with Windows 8. After two weeks, the hard drive failed. (SMART Error) I requested a replacement HD from Dell and requesed that it have the 'factory image' because the user hadn't gotten around to creating the restore media. The drive arrived a couple days later with a sticker on the static bag that says 'Imaged'. I pop the drive into the system and wait, and wait, and wait.... Finally, it reboots and while finishing the installation, it says that there is a problem and I should reboot to restart the installation. This repeats endlessly. I called Dell back and they said they would send me the Recovery Media which showed up in a couple more days. I tried to have the recovery media repair the installation, but ended up right back to where I was when I first put the drive into the computer and after waiting.... Error, reboot to reinstall. I then used the media to do a factory restore which worked. The PC now boots into Windows 8, but without any of the pre-installed software that came with the system. In addition, there is no recovery partition to recover the system if there is a problem. I know I have a media key, but I would prefer not to leave it with the user for safety reasons. I want to have the recovery partition so that I can instruct the user to use it on the phone and avoid going to the office myself. My questions are: 1) Can I create the recovery partition myself or failing that, can I duplicate the recovery key and leave the duplicate with the user? 2) How do I get all the original software that would have come with the PC originally?
Thanks