New Dell

Well. I just set up my Dell computer last night and installed a few programs one of which was PartitionMagic which I think may be the cause of the problem I will talk about below.

I woke up this morning and turned on my computer to find that whenever it tried to start Vista up the bars stopped right at the start and then it restarted to try and get me to go in to Startup Repair utilities. I tried all the utilities in it, most of them didn't work or showed errors.

I later found that somehow my Vista partition got deleted from the hard drive and now there is only unallocated space and my recovery partition (came with Dell).

I tried using some programs I have on disc but they all want a 50Mb RAM drive and my computer keeps saying "invalid drive specification", "file creation error", "bad command or file name", and then finally, "!! Error creating RamDrive !!".

I tried using the reinstallation disc you get with Dell computers but it won't create a partition because the unallocated space has to be NTFS.

Hmm... what do I do?

 

Control and f 11 [at the same time] should get you into the restore partition, cant imagine you deleted a partition that had windows ,running from windows. Strange things happen. Keep me informed. ed

 

That's where I was before.

I get to the Collecting information part of the reinstallation.

Disk 0 Partition 2 RECOVERY 10.0GB 6.6GB Primary
Disk 0 Unallocated Space 222.8GB 222.8GB Primary

When I click on each one the follow messages come up:

RECOVERY partition says: The recommended free space for installation is 14194MB

Unallocated space says: Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space. Windows must be installed to a partition formatted as NTFS.

 

Did you format a partition in fat? ed

 

After reading your post a little better, i think you are trying to restore to your recovery partition, it is fat 32. ed

 

No. I want to create a partition on the unallocated space using NTFS; however, it does not let me create a partition:

Failed to create a new partition on the selected unused space. [Error: 0x8004240f].

 

Nevermind. Thank you all for your help. I called Dell and they helped me through it.

 

hi
i am also having this problem
how did you solve it? care to share? i am also using dell lap top...

 

I can't recall each step but it took awhile with their aid. I would suggest calling them because it is quite complicated and involves steps you wouldn't think of.

Sorry.

 

any starting steps u can guild me? or recall any steps? i trying hard to think now... tomorrow i will be in office and will not be able to do it...

 

how did u format the HD?