Arhilladus

Yes, I suspected that, so I went ahead and contacted Dell, they were happy to send me a replacement HDD with a fully functional Recovery Partition and I returned my original Drive. So my particular problem was eliminated rather than solved!

It is most likely a mismatch between a 64-bit WinRE version and 32-bit PCRestore.exe or vice versa, I read and followed all the instructions in this thread and found the same problem, I am now in need of a 64-bit version of the Dell PCRestore.exe file. I'll be deeply grateful to the user who can share his copy of the file.