I want to restore my dell inspiron mini but I dont have an external disk drive. f11 f8 f10 during boot up does not work. Help me?

Hi omovik,

Good observation on the external monitor piece. Check if the notebook display works fine when you enter BIOS (F2 during start-up) or during diagnostics (Fn+Power). If the issue persists on these steps then it's a faulty LCD. Do keep me updated on the status.

Thanks and Regards.
Kiran Kumar.
#iworkfordell.

Resetting a Dell Inspiron to the factory settings allows the user to restore the Dell Inspiron to the original operating condition as if it was just taken out of the box. Dell system includes a restore utility called 'Dell Symantec System Restore' to reset or restore your Dell system to factory setting.

Get the step-by-step how to guide..http://technical-support-squad.blogspot.in/2012/08/dell-inspiron-how-to-factory-reset.html

Turn Off the computer, now as soon as you hit the power button, keep on holding "Alt" key & keep on tapping "F10 key,ie: Alt+F10, it will open the recovery console ,select full factory restore and follow on screen instruction. (Note:this will erase all datas on the computer)

or
During the boot process you will see on the screen to press a certain key to enter setup
Press and hold that key during the boot up process to enter BIOS you can load failsafe defaults or load optimized defaults ,press escape then press f10 to save to cmos to restart

Hope this helps

It's usually Control & F11 (which works on my sons 10inch dell) but whether there is a restore partition may depend on your hard drive size. If you received install/recovery disks, you may have little choice but to get hold of an external CD Drive.

Then definitely you dont have the Default partition on the computer.. If you are under Dell warranty call dell @ 18006249896.. They will give you a harddrive with the default partition.. Else try to get a USB CD drive from friends and reinstall the OS...

You can make a bootable USB stick with everything you want and boot from it.

Stelios.

don't hit ctrl f11 instead hit F8 and then go into Dell Factory Image Restore, that will wipe, format and reinstall all the factory software that's stored on the Recovery Drive.

or reformat your laptop using your cd

Put recovery disk in the CD drive. On reboot, hold down F12 key. You should get a choice of drives to boot from. Make sure the first two are in the correct order:

1. CD-ROM (optical drive)
2. HDD (hard drive)

then press F10 to save and exit.

Now the laptop should boot correctly from the recovery disk.

Okay, do as follows.

(a) Boot the computer. When you see a blue bar with www.dell.com on the screen, hit Ctrl + F11.
(b) On the next screen, click "Restore".
(c) Next, click "Confirm".
(d) Let the restore process run. It will probably take 10-ish minutes. Don't touch it while it's doing it's thing.
(e) When prompted, click "Finish" to reboot the computer.
(f) When prompted, click "Yes".
(g) When prompted, click "Next".
(h) After the computer restarts, click "OK".