I have used it successfully on a Compaq laptop. There is a program called Aoemi One Key that will create a Recovery Partition and set the key you press at boot to do the recovery but I do not know how it will work with this Dell Partition Setup. On a normal Windows 7 install you would see an active 100MB System Reserved Partition marked Active and the Windows Partition. Windows 7 has it's own system image creator but the Macrium and Aoemi are much better in my opinion. These will let you create a bootable USB or CD that will let you recover a disk image backed up to a external hard drive. What I can recommend it doing a complete image backup using Macrium Free or Aoemi Backupper Standard. Unfortunately I do not know how to get the Dell Backup Manager Working again. Very Nice! Thanks for this tip on how to solve the problem and taking the time to post it.