Question : Restoring a Dell studio 1535 to factory default

I have a customers Dell Studio 1535 that needs a re-build. The c: drive has been formatted however the recovery partition is still there.

I have since found that the onboard cd-rom drive will not read cd's or DVD's, I have plugged in an external USB dvd drive but it won't recognise that.

Is there any other way that I can get into the recovery partition and start the machine re-building?

Answer : Restoring a Dell studio 1535 to factory default

Not sure why this machine would not boot from the usb dvd drive however I created a bootable copy of windows 7 and it booted / installed from that ok.