Conserve data partition after recovery. Acer aspire 5750G

[gargamel69]

I have an acer aspire 5750G with 2 user partitions: One with the operating system and programs and a second one with user data.
The computer had originally only one user partition, I created the second one afterwards. I would like to perform a recovery from the hidden partition to bring the computer to factory settings. Is it possible to do the recovery to one of the partitions leaving the data partition intact? or the recovery will also modify my partition table?
Many thanks for your help.
Marc

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Some manufacturer's factory recovery process will overwrite the entire hard drive with new partitions as existed when the laptop left the factory (my Toshiba laptop certainly does) but I don't know if Dell recovery does the same.

The safest thing to do, therefore, is back up all your user data to an external hard drive (you should already have it backed up anyway to prevent data loss) before you carry out the recovery.