Aurora R4 -- partition / recovery questions

Question

Hi, I have an Aurora R4 from April/May of 2013, Win 81. A few questions. The computer is ~7 months old, I hit a snag doing a windows updates about 3 months ago (pre-8.1 update) and had to do a recovery that somewhat worked, but programs still have a lot of issues even after reinstalling them. I am thinking of installing Win7 but want to ensure I can get back to factory Win8 if necessary before I do. If I created recovery disks via Alien Respawn last week, will these disks reflect the factory image that came when the system was shipped? Or will all the cruft that accumulated up to last week be included (since it says 'factory backup', I am going to assume it restores the system to factory settings from the disk) Currently there are 5 partitions on the RAID HD. If I delete the partitions (to say install Windows 7) will I still be able to do a factory restore back to Windows 8 from the disks? Will the factory restore media put the partitions back, or are those partitions required to store the factory image? Do I need RAID drivers to do a win7 install? It seems to be hardware RAID since that's how it shipped from alienware. If I do go to Win7, can I download things like 'ThermalControls' from Alienware? (related, at some point a few weeks ago, my machine went from almost always silent, to SUPER load until i manually went in and configured ThermalControls. From the factory, it was very quiet except for about 2 seconds on startup, now it is SUPER loud until I am fully loaded into my desktop and the manual profile I configured loads. There were no changes I made that should have caused this to happen.) Thanks for your help. Let me know if you need any more details.

Milena M458 · Answer

Hello Aneas!

Let me answered your questions in order.

1. Yes in the disk will be reflected the factory image that came originally with the computer.

2. The image is on the Recovery Discs you created so partitions aren't needed.

3.Yes you will need the IRST driver in order to install windows 7

4. You can try to fix the problem of the loud fans by uninstalling the command center, perform a power drain and install the command center again.

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