Solved Dell Latitude 10 Essentials: cannot use System Recovery

[Anusha]

Hi,

I've got this Dell tablet and it's touch screen has gone kaput. It works sometimes, it doesn't most of the times. It has gotten worse in the last few days. It only used to do that when resuming from Standby previously.

[video=youtube;E45yOcwGFpk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E45yOcwGFpk[/video]

There is nothing I can do about it from my end. I have contacts Dell support and it seems they will take it back for repairs.

In the meantime, my recovery partition seems to be not working either. I first wanted to factory reset it to see if it is a software issue. (Easier to RMA as well) Dell has their own recovery software called Dell Backup and Recovery and it doesn't work. It would reboot back to Windows 8's recovery environment (F8 anyone?) and wait there. I have used Recovery once and maybe it screwed up everything. I don't know.

I tried Windows's Refresh and Recovery features and they don't work either. Refresh asks me to insert the media .



Recovery tells me that i cannot find a recovery image in my drive.



I have used Refresh many times when the touch screen problem originally appeared, and then it didn't ask for the install media. Seems that it was using the recovery image that was originally in the drive.

Now the recovery image is either missing or inaccessble by any sort of recovery. I tried creating a Recovery media using the Dell Backup and Recovery software and it also stops saying that an error has occured. How informative.



If the recovery image is only inaccessible, I wanna know if anyone has tips to get it fixed.

This is the current state of Disk Management screen. Why are there so many partitions? The right click menu only pops up for C: partition. It's empty for other partitions.



BTW, I have Windows 8.1 Preview installed as well. I have used Refresh few times after that as well. I don't think it has anything to do with the issue. But it would be great if I can reset it back to factory image before sending for RMA.

Thanks in advance.

 

[JustATest]

Hello Anusha,

You can try either one of the procedure here and see if this helps:

Restore factory settings on a Latitude 10 - Mobile Devices Forum - Mobile Devices - Dell Community

Good luck and let us know.

 

[Anusha]

i've tried them already, if you read my opening post.

 

[JustATest]

i've tried them already, if you read my opening post.

Yeah, I read it. Hope it works for you when you get it back from Dell.

 

[strollin]

It could be that the recovery image has somehow been deregistered. Do a search on the disk for a file named CustomRefresh.wim. If such a file is found, make note of the directory it is in. You can then reregister it by opening an elevated command prompt and entering the command: Recimg /setcurrent <directory>

Open an elevated command prompt and enter: recimg /? to see what other options are available for the recimg command.

 

[Anusha]

I feel that too. But the recovery image is not on C:

If you look at the disk management screenshot I posted, the recovery image seems to be located in the final partition. But I don't know how to access it. Or how to register it to work again. Any ideas?

 

[Anusha]

At least I managed to reinstall Windows 8 by running the setup from Windows and remove the traces of 8.1 Preview. No issues with Activation, but I seems as if all the drivers aren't installed. The touch screen is not working, but in not sure if it is because it really isn't working or because a driver is missing.

I couldn't find a proper driver for Touch Screen on Dell support website.

Perhaps the drivers are in the disc that shipped with the tablet. I have to plug in my DVD drive via USB. Will do that when I get back home.

Still looking or a way to get that Recovery functionality working again.

 

[Anusha]

Fixed it.

I just ran the Windows setup from within Windows. I used a flash drive, bootable with Windows 8 32bit. but maybe that was not necessary. wonder if an mounted ISO file alone would have been enough for this.

This allowed me to install Windows 8 over 8.1 Preview. Didn't ask for a serial as well.

After it was done installing, I installed Dell Backup and Recovery software (downloaded from Dell). From there I could now use the old Recovery functionality without any issue. It must have been the Windows 8.1 Preview installation that corrupted the thing.



Now I can send it for repair or replacement without any fears. The touch input is not working. It's a hardware malfunction. But at least now there is no software malfunction.

Anyways, just to be safe, I now need to make a recovery media.