>>I think you are supposed to call DELL technical support and have them hold your hand through reinstallations. I had trouble with the DELL BIOS lockout on a laptop I had and they made me jump through hoops for over an hour before they even attempted to start helping.
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>That could be (though efforts to reach a human by phone at Dell-support seemed quite hopeless and/or very-prolonged, as you say). But the "password" here *could be* something only a Dell tech knows, that's certainly possible, now that I think about it.
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>Guess I'm going back to using GoBack for wider workstation "safety," and purchase at a volume-rate, in the meantime. I can't even begin to count how many times it's saved me a lot of grief. Good product, though watch for setting GoBack to save too much non-vital info, it can hit performance hard if sized too large (but that's not it's purpose, anyway).
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>But maybe I'll try a Dell-support email with my serial #, etc. And though that's probably too slow for urgent problems, it may get a good long-term solution. Actually, I can't even say emaiing Dell support is slow, as I haven't ever tried it.

Sounds like a pain to me to have to go and install all the backup software just because DELL can't make things easier. Might I suggest checking out GHOST by Norton. We have used it successfully for test machine setup for quite a while. It creates and image of the hard drive and you can put in on a CD. Then just startup a computer with a floppy and you can restore the system. Its good for going back to the "freshly installed" state. If you have working data you want to keep then the GoBack software is probably best.

Good luck and have fun!