Reformatting HD and Recovering Vista

[swizzskill]

I recently decided to restore my PC to factory condition. I use a dell dimension and was not sent a dell recovery cd. Not knowing what to do, I installed a copy of XP from an old laptop. It will not work. I need to recover Vista. Any ideas? I just downloaded a recovery disc from NeoSmart and am going to try that.

[roraniel]

I am confused. Did you use the built in Dell recovery process or just try to install XP?
If you reformatted the entire disk, you may have deleted the partition the built in recovery uses but here is a link to directions for restoring your Dell to "out of the box" condition. Try this assuming you have did not format the entire drive.

Dell - Technical Support

Note that this deletes ALL your data. It will put it back to the day you took it out of the box.