Alienrespawn "failure to access"(?)

After a recent harddrive failure I am wanting to use Alienrespawn (Ar) to create a recovery disk.  I used a Dell provided Windows 8 installation disk, which did create a number of partitions on the HD (presumably one of them being a recovery partition).  The first time I ran Ar it reported improper version (ie., 1.4).

I went to the Dell support website, and for my Svc code it failed to run the online diagnostic, reporting "encounted a problem, please try again", which I did numerous times with the same result ...

So much for Dell indicating the appropriate version of Ar, so I went to the Ar website and downloaded v.1.7.  It seemed to install properly but upon re-starting and running Ar it went immediately into a state that implied it was finishing the installation.  After a few minutes and during the first phase it reported "failure to access", and then clicking on "Finish" proceeded to uninstall Alienrespawn(?!?!)  I ran it from an administer's account.

Edit: I ran Windows 8.1 "Create Recovery drive" and its option to copy the recovery partition was greyed out.  This is supposed to mean a recovery drive is not available.  But if I use Disk Management to inspect the system drive (C) it shows 3 partitions (1) healthy EFI System partition (260Mb), (2) Healthy "boot, ..., primary" NTFS partition (930Gb), and (3) Healthy Recovery partition (450MB).

Please advise ...

TIA  :)

Dell Alienware X51, Windows 8.1