I bought a Dell Studio XPS 8100 desktop back in 2010, which had Windows 7 installed and came with a partition for Dell Factory Restore.
After having installed Windows 10, what happened to that partition? Did the installation get rid of it? If not and I were to use it to do a Dell Factory Restore, would it "reinstall" Windows 7?
Sorry if this is a duplicate of a question somewhere, I didn't see one exactly like this asking about Windows 10 upgrade and Dell's Recovery partition.
The recovery partition will not be touched nor upgraded during this process. If you did a factory restore, you would end up with Windows 7.
From what I am seeing, if there is not a system partition on the drive, only the Dell recovery partition & OS partition, then Windows 10 will alter the boot folder of that partition. This effects the PE recovery environment & will break the factory recovery. Even after reapplying the Factory.wim of windows 7 and it blue screens, Windows 10 PE recovery environment will start & not help with the start up issues. I'm presently trying to undo all of this on a Dell Inspiron laptop at present.
I don't think this will happen if there is a 100MB system partition on the drive as this is where the Windows 10 recovery environment will install (in the boot folder). Thus leaving the Dell Recovery partition untouched leaving the F11 function in tact to be able to factory install the OS that shipped with the laptop. Isn't the digital life wonderful!!!
If you run into a problem where you cannot access your recovery partition, or the partition is deleted, you can run a tool called DSRFIX and it should restore the recovery partition.
