I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 my parents bought about 3 years ago, and in the course of three years a series of unfortunate events have brought it to me for fixing... The Long story: [SIZE="1"]The first thing that happened was last year my dad managed to rip up the power cord... we bought a new one after he tried to merge my old laptop's extension with his. That really doesn't come into account with this, I just thought it was amusing. In the last year abouts the warnings that told us our battery was dying and it would be in our best interests to buy a new one turned into alerts that said to buy a new one now. Their solution was to just to keep the laptop plugged in at all times. Two weeks ago they'd caught a number of viruses while I was away at school. My older brother came home for reading week before me so he decided to install windows XP professional with SP3 onto the computer. I'd asked him to check out the partition but he insisted this would work just as well. And it did, for the most part.No extra drivers to get it up and running... Unfortunately I don't know what he did to the partitions. Two days ago the laptop began infinite start up loops. My parents lost all their files to yet another e-mail virus (I'm suspecting... the first virus was the same kind of e-mail virus) At this point they decided they'd had enough and bought a new laptop, which I installed several types of spyware and adware protection on. And in their generousity they gave me their old laptop to use while I'm at home. I couldn't find the CD my older brother had used (apparently it was thrown away?) so I found an older cd and tried to boot up the computer (I was just checking to see if the computer would still run. ) I ended up installing this version of XP but it wouldn't connect to the internet even if I wired it. So I've been trying to find my way into the restore partition and get it from there.[/SIZE] The Short Story: So after the laptop had be reformatted (without using the partition as I had asked to be looked at), once by my brother and once by me, I can see what I believe to be the recovery partition (30 - 50 MB as FAT32) but I can't get into it. The Dell MBR is long gone. I've played around with DSRFIX (goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm) but there are fatal errors with the partition formatting (it was changed to NFTS and there are only 2). I think the first small partition was deleted during one of the reformats so I think if I can bring it back DRSFIX should work... but I don't know. Any suggestions?
