I should say as a disclaimer that this did not work for me. I suspect because I had a bigger problem (still unsolved): Windows 7 can't find my SSD drive.
But if your computer came with a regular hard drive and the Dell Recovery partition is on that drive, you may be in luck.
First of all, if you deleted the Dell Recovery partition without further ado, you may despair now. This will not help you. You are left with a fresh install of whatever OS will work.
This how-to applies if
1) You still have the Dell recovery partition on your drive and
2) You have tried absolutely every mean under the Sun to do a factory reset (except this one).
To hack a factory reset, you will need
1) The Dell recovery partition intact on your hard drive
2) A spare computer running Windows 7 if yours, like mine, has been hijacked and destroyed by Windows 10
3) A Linux Live USB drive
4) A Windows PE USB drive
5) A third USB thumbdrive
There is a way to do it with fewer thumb drives, but it will be even more complicated.
First, let's gather the pieces.
To verify whether you have the original Dell partition on your hard drive, see this post. Take a picture of the disk manager window, the same way I did in my post. You will need to know what is what. Also, because it shows more details, use diskpart to list your partitions and take a picture of the output (see this post). For good measure, in addition to list disk and list vol, do a list partition. Record everything.
If your OS is broken and you can't boot into it, we will see other ways that you can check whether you have your recovery partition. You will definitely want to create a Linux Live USB drive. It will allow you to access the files on your computer and create a friendly environment where you can easily back them up - covered here.
If you do not have anything on your computer that is worth saving and you are a maverick, you can skip the whole Linux thing, it's for backup purposes. But if you do have a recovery partition on your disk, I highly recommend you back it up. Even if like me, you end up not being able to do the factory reset, it's always good to have it. And to properly back up the recovery partition, Linux is good.
So let's create a Linux Live USB. Here you have a choice between Ubuntu and Mint. Mint is my favorite at the moment, so I will use that, but Ubuntu (more popular) would work just as well and would be very similar on how you create and use the USB.
Linux is an alternate operating system, preferred by a small niche of computer geeks and astronomers. It has its kinks, but overall it works. It allows full control over the computer and new editions are relatively easy to use. I would say Linux has surpassed Windows in terms of being user friendly, because of nice improvements in the desktop environments of Linux and because Windows went downhill in that category. It is a light weight OS that comes in many flavors. The underlying OS is all the same, it's just the desktop environments that get slapped on top that differ. Mac users will adapt to Ubuntu more easily, while Mint has a desktop that looks more familiar to PC users.
Enough history. Let's make our Mint USB.
You will need to download an image of the OS and install a USB creator. This can all be done on your spare Windows 7 computer (or any PC really). But I will assume a Windows environment.
Download Linux Mint here. Unless you have an old computer, you will want to download the 64 bit version. Like they recommend, download Cinnamon. MATE is for Mac users. Once you get to the download page, pick a download mirror near you and click on its name. This will initiate the download of an iso file.
iso files are image files that traditionally were burned to DVDs by software like Nero. As a matter of fact, if you have a blank DVD and a DVD drive in your sick laptop, you can use that as an alternative to USB. But Linux runs beautifully off USB (not as fussy as Windows) and I will discuss the USB route.
Once you have downloaded the iso file, use a program to create a bootable Live USB drive of Mint. There are options, but one I like to use is unetbootin. It's a simple, compact program.
When you use unetbootin, you will want to click on the radio button next to "Diskimage" then click on the ... button and navigate to where you downloaded your iso file. You also need to select the USB Drive where you put your flash drive and then you click OK and watch the magic unfold. You will need a USB with a capacity of at least 4 GB.
The last piece we need is a bootable Windows PE flash drive. That's a little complicated, so it is worthy of a new post.
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