There are no images as they are unique to the particular system build. You are basically out of luck. Once you lose the ability to access the Recovery partition there is nothing you can do.

Since you were going to wipe it out anyways. your best option is to wait until you get the new drive.

I get that - although the number of configurations for an M11x is so limited that actually building an image would be viable.

The thing is though, I have the image - it's in the 16Gb of data on the recovery drive. What I'm saying is that without the Dell Datasafe Local tool, I can't extract it. But for whatever reason, there isn't a copy of the Datasafe Local tool to install - the support guy was as surprised as I was.

The problem could be easily resolved by having the tool available for download - that way Dell don't have to go to the expense of building another drive, and shipping it to me - the margin on the laptop itself is so slight that they've just blown their profit away because of this - the time in man hours alone spent on this obviates any profit on this particular machine.

Alternatively, they could use the Phoenix failsafe in the BIOS, but that's deactivated in my BIOS, and there's no way to activate it. Another item that the tech support agent was surprised at and told me he thought that would be corrected in a BIOS patch.

I guess you forgot to read the manual.  The DVD is to reinstall Win 7 only not to restore the drive to the factory installation.  If you follow the instructions provided by Dell, you could have restored the drive to the factory configuration but its too late now.  There is an independent website that might help you use that restore function but I don't remember the url.  Maybe another reader can point you in the right direction.

I totally agree and I freely admit that if I'd dug out the manual, and gone through it I'd have found that. But in my defense, Dell are one of the few OEMs that appear to still ship Windows media - the vast majority use a Recovery partition (like the Dell one) and on the first boot, and subsequent boots, inform you that you need to pay attention to that fact, and may need to create your own recovery discs from that partition. HP do that for example, and then charge you for a set of recovery discs if you lose them - so faced with a disc, that implies it's a recovery media, I stuck it in. I realized almost immediately that it wasn't what I was after, as soon as Windows setup azctually started and wasn't in anyway automated, but by then setup had already removed the Repair Your Computer option Dell have in there, and on every subsequent attempt to boot the machine informed me the boot sector was damaged. Given that, I had no recourse but to complete the setup, and hope that although it said "contains no drivers or programs" in itsy-bitsy text on the disc on minute inspection that it would have a means to rewrite the repair option, and allow me to uyse the "proper", as laid out in the manual, process for recovery.

On the other hand, Dell's support agents seem woefully unprepared for this device; it took me three attempts to talk to an agent after the first two couldn't find anything based on my service tag and express service code, that third individual was stumped as he thought (a) I should be able to download Datasafe and (b) failing that I should be able to use Phoenix Failsafe - neither of which were an option, and finally I have spent over 90 minutes on online chat, and on the telephone, trying to buy a second power adapter for the M11x, and even though I had the part number written on the original it took 4 agents before someone could find that part, and it took him 33 minutes to take my order. I'm hoping, really hoping that I caught Dell on a bad day, because as service goes, the experience was less than pleasent when I've just spent $1,200 on the laptop, and the level of support information is low - although there's plenty of information on how Datasafe Local doesn't work properly on the M11x and has issues with the Binary GFX system (with the fix information

I'm continuing to look, but to be honest, I'm loathe to do anything now that might corrupt the data in the recovery partition, so I'm going to have to wait for the replacement hard drive, but it still strikes me as vaguely silly that Datasafe Local isn't available for download, even if only at the request of a support agent, as I don't think I'm going to be unique in this problem (or maybe I am )

Just as a side note - the DVD actually says the following:

"The software included on this Recovery DVD-ROM was preinstalled on your hard drive at the factory and may only be used for backup and recovery of your Alienware computer system."

And page 84 onwards in the manual for Alienware M11x doesn't explicitly call out that the "Operating System Reinstallation Disc" won't restore a system to a usable condition. In fact, there's only one line that says "Contains operating system installation media", and in addition under System Applications on page 84 it says "Some of the software that is pre-installed on your computer does not include a backup CD/DVD. This software is available at My Dell Downloads (downloadstore.dell.com/media/)"

But Datasafe Local isn't available there for download - only Cyberlink Youcam and a number of different language versions of the Adobe Reader are.

So I think I can be forgiven for making the mistake I did given the lack of information, and conflicting information

I feel for you and as far as i think even a unique system with custom installation should have custom restore image with it thats what you are paying the money for it.even small custom builders make a final image of the system when they think every thing is installed since they don't want to go through re-installing and rebooting systems like 20 times if some thing go wrong oh well think a lesson well learned from this not to play around with a system unless you make an image of the system since a DVD cost is like less then a $ so worth it to image it.

Syed F Ali

C.E.O

www.bestwaycomputers.com

www.stategeeks.com

same her pal, for me the facial recognision totally messed up, logged me out every 5 minutes...id had enough, opened dell datasafe and nothing, it wouldnt even regonise my recovery partition, heres my advice. all the 16 or so drivers are up in the my drivers section of the alienware site, get them all burn them to dvd, do a full format, get rid of the recovery section i have and now have an extra 16 gig free not going to waste, and you have the software. drivers everything you can install yourself on bootup and the fx center, facial recognision everything will work fine, my m11x is like new, and it feels like my laptop now as ive installed and made it how i want. i didnt have a dell image option either, but as i say the datasafe didnt eve work for me so thats why i didnt have an option for it.

Yes, it does seem that Dell jumped the shark with this one, which is a shame, as the potential for this machine is so high, even without a Core i(insert 3, 5 or 7 here dependant on how much spare cash you have floating around) to power the thing.

Anyway, just to update folks, I called Dell again yesterday, to discover, not to my surprise, that they had no record of my previous call with them, so no new hard drive had been sent out. I wasn't a happy bunny. Their attempts to remote connect to the machine using "Alien Contact" (or Cisco GoToMyPC as the rest of us mere mortals would know it as) were once again unsuccessful and they promised to email me a link to where I could download Datasafe Local. Needless to say, nothing yet.

Anyway, I decided nothing ventured nothing gained, and decided to dig around in the Recovery partition - after all, the worst I could do is screw that up as well and have to just reinstall and try to fix all the problems Dell have with this machine's software installation myself as you suggest bellyboy56. Lo and behold ... the recovery data is in a bog standard WIM file (Windows IMage) so in theory all I need to do now is create a WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) boot disc, and let it pull the image off the D: drive. I'll let everyone know if it succeeds, but frankly, I am stunned and highly disappointed that the support technicians didn't know how the recovery information was held on the PC - the quality of their training really must be woefully inadequate, and I feel for them.

So, I'll let folks know - thanks for everyone's "advice" so far, and thanks bellyboy56 for commiserating - I'm sorry you've had problems as well.

Frankly, my advice for folks in the future is going to be to buy a Sony VAIO Z-series machine...

When someone decides to reinstall their notebook/desktop PC most, if not all of the drivers and software applications can be obtained from Dell's support link using the service tag number assigned to the PC and from the My DELL Downloads web site.

The My DELL Downloads site permits only a limited number of times (e.g. 3) that you can retrieve a copy of your application software so be sure to burn a copy of those re-installation executables to DVD.

Did you try the Win 7 image restore program that ships with Win 7?

Restore your computer from a system image backup

You can use a system image to restore the contents of your computer if your hard disk or entire computer ever stops working. For more information about system images, see What is a system image?

Warning

Before starting, make sure that the removable media that your backup is stored on is available, if applicable. Also, make sure that the disk that you're restoring the backup to is the same size or larger than the disk that you backed up.

MarkTho Man, really thanks, you are my hero man I just got my Aurora Desktop this week, and i was with the same problem. Ive done the steps  you provided and everything was perfect. Just to inform you, my processor is a i7 920 and i also had to use the amd64 bit version from imagex. When i tried the ia64, the application told me that the program was valid but wasn't for my system. Anyways, it worked perfect using the amd64. Everything here was just as you said, even the drive letters :-)

Thanks man, you helped me a lot !!! I'm sure that this post of yours will help a bunch of people.

Peace man !!!

Hi sawaddi, yeah, I looked at that, the trouble is that reinstalling a generic (albeit Alienware branded) copy of Windows 7 nuked most of the options, and the Windows System Recovery tool refused to use the FACTORY.WIM file that was in the recovery partition, even when I removed the hidden attributes etc. from the partition. Options 1,2 you list above therefore didn't work, and there was no "System Repair" option during the Windows 7 setup when I tried that. Believe me - I wouldn't have gone to all the trouble with IMAGEX if I hadn't tried all of those options before

Now having said and done all of that, I've installed Acronis True Image Home 2010 and created an image of all the partitions on the machine so I can completely restore everything in the event of it being needed. Once bitten, twice shy and all that

Hello,

I got the same problem as you did, and I kind of got to (almost) the same solution.

The only problem is that it didn't work for me as it did for you. On the last step when I performed imagex /apply ... command it first seemed to work fine and got to 100% "Applying progress", but then it gets an error:

[Error] d:\windows\system32\NlsLexicons00f.dll ,

Error resoring image.

The specified image file did not contain a resource section.

Any ideas what can be wrong for me? I have a new Dell Studio 1749 laptop with Windows 7.

Btw, my Restore partion contains 2 filew - Factory.wim (3.9Gb) and Factroy2.wim (1.4 Gb). - Don't know if it's relevant..

I cracked my head today! Any help is appreciated!!!