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22 Posts
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417508
Unable to restore an Alienware M11x
Hi folks, so I've got a bit of a problem, and I'm hoping someone can help me out.
My lovely new Alienware M11x was delivered last week and after playing with it for a while, I had to install a bunch of things to do a demo. Demo over, I looked at all the things I had to uninstall and thought - "Hah! Easy - I'll just factory restore the thing" plugged in an external DVD drive, stuffed in the disk that came with the machine, rebooted and let it install. Uh oh. I now have an Alienware M11x with a basic, completely standard installation of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
There's no drivers installed. No Dell applications installed. No nice backdrops. No Alienware applications. Nothing. Zip. Nada. The only "customization" is an Alienware logo in the System Properties.
So I called technical support - it appears what I should have done is use Dell Datasafe Local to restore - but here's the crunch - reinstalling Windows 7, from the Dell/Alienware supplied Media has removed the option under System Repair to restore the Dell Factory Image
I can't find Dell Datasafe Local to download on the Dell support site - only Dell Datasafe Online. I can find patches for local, but not the actual application itself.
The recovery partition is still there - all 16Gb of it.
Dell support tell me they'll have to send me out a new hard drive, with the original image on it, then I have to replace the hard drive. WHAT? Surely there must be a download of Datasafe Local somewhere on the Dell support site, or some way of restoring the option on the F8/Startup/Repair menu. I can't believe that there isn't.
Anybody got any ideas? Please?
flatton
14 Posts
0
November 19th, 2011 07:00
hey mark! i read your post for restoring an image in alienware and need some help. i got and error after the image got installed and got the applying 100% saying:
D:\WINDOWS\SPEECH\\ENGINES\SR\EN-ES\T1033.NGR (ERROR = 1812)
got back to windows and some stuff are installed, as alienware command center, alienware m17x, and wihd controller, just like when it came from factory, but still have no wifi, looks awefull and i know is not working fine.
can u please help me?
i screwed up with my alienware m17x and i really need some help, cause tech support is not helping me at all.
thanks so much!
MarkTho
22 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 10:00
Interesting.
What happens if you assign a drive letter to the Recovery partition in Disk Management? Theoretically you should be able to address the partition by it's drive number and partition number, but that's kind of painful, so I'd try assigning a drive letter first. Good luck - once you can access the partition it should work okay, I'd give it a try myself to try and replicate it for you, but I sold my 11x and bought an HP Envy 14
chandailrc
4 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 10:00
If this works, then my sir you are a GENIUS.
But I am having trouble at STEP 1 (so noob of me xD)
I have gone and altered the folder options to
1.) Show hidden files and folders
2.) Show protected system files
But still I am not able to see the Recovery Drive "X" in "My Computer"
I am sure that I still have the Recovery Drive in my system as the "Disk Management" tool shows the Recovery Drive.
Please guide me at what I am doing wrong.
My system is Alienware M17X with Windows 7 Home Premium
chandailrc
4 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 10:00
If this works, then my sir you are a GENIUS.
But I am having trouble at STEP 1 (so noob of me xD)
I have gone an altered the folder options to
1.) Show hidden files and folders
2.) Show protected system files
But still I am not able to see the Recovery Drive "X" in "My Computer"
I am sure that I still have the Recovery Drive in my system as the "Disk Management" tool shows the Recovery drive.
Please guide me at what I am doing wrong.
My system is Alienware M17X with Windows 7 Home Premium
chandailrc
4 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 10:00
If this works, then my sir you are a GENIUS.
But I am having trouble at STEP 1 (so noob of me xD)
I have gone and altered the folder options to
1.) Show hidden files and folders
2.) Show protected system files
But still I am not able to see the Recovery Drive "X" in "My Computer"
I am sure that I still have the Recovery Drive in my system as the "Disk Management" tool shows the Recovery Drive.
Please guide me at what I am doing wrong.
My system is Alienware M17X with Windows 7 Home Premium
chandailrc
4 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 11:00
Umm...
You sure reassigning the recovery drive a lettter will not affect it's functioning.? I mean in the Disk Management tool it appears as "Recovery" with no drive letter but when I was clean booting I saw that the Recovery Drive was assigned the letter X
MarkTho
22 Posts
0
March 12th, 2012 12:00
Sorry - I thought you were saying that it didn't have a drive letter, that's why I was suggesting assigning one to it
.
You should find when you boot in to WinRE (steps 6 and 7) that you can find which drive the recovery partition is through the "Install a driver" option (step 12), in my case, and the case of other Dell machines I've had to do this on, the recovery partition was always assigned C: and the boot drive was now D:. This "swaps" when the system is rebooted after the imaging is complete.
What happens when you follow the steps? Remember, nothing gets written to the drive until you execute step 16 with IMAGEX. Can you find the FACTORY.WIM file if you browse the partition?
Spork Schivago
2 Posts
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December 27th, 2014 12:00
Just a quick suggestion or two, if you format the OS partition first, you don't get those error messages. The downside is though, it removes all your files, so if you're going to do that, back it up. Also, instead of needing a thumb drive for ImageX.exe, you can install WAIK on the Alienware laptop itself and just copy it to the recovery partition. Thank you for such a wonderful right up. Saved me a lot of work of trying to figure it out myself. My system was just likes yours, recovery partition on the C: drive and OS on the D: drive. I copied the wholes tools\amd64 directory from the WAIK to the recovery partition. Then I created a batch file so next time I needed to do something like this (in case the factory.wim file doesn't fix the F8 - Advanced Boot Options -- Restore using System Image problem).
So, now on my recovery partition, I have a tools\AMD64 directory with all the files from the tools\AMD64 WAIK.
I called my batch file Recovery.cmd and put it in the root directory (C:\ of the Recovery partition)
Below is a copy of the batch file I created:
@echo off
format /FS:NTFS /V:OS /Q D:
\tools\AMD64\imagex.exe /APPLY C:\Dell\Image\Factory.wim 1 D:\
Now all anyone has to do is create that file on the recovery partition and when they're ready to do a factory install, simply go to the recovery partition and type Recovery.cmd
If your OS partition is something other than D:, change the D: to whatever your OS partition is. Be sure to back up your files first, the format command will destroy everything on the OS partition. It should also prevent any warnings from appearing (and remove any viruses you may have lurking around on your PC). Good luck.
Dweomere
2 Posts
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May 24th, 2015 20:00
I see this post has continued to generate interest for several years. I have a variation on this problem, I think. I have my recovery partition, and in attempting to upgrade my hard drive I've lost the ability to update windows. (The more I look at this, I think maybe I need to start a new thread.) I initially used the Acronis tool included with my new drive to clone the whole shebang to a new SSD. In doing so i noticed some system problems, and decided i could afford to ditch the new setup and manually install games and programs, so decided to do a system restore. Everything seemed to go fine. Lag went away, and the system booted fast and was very responsive, until I tried to grab the applicable Windows updates.
Now I can't get my system current because the update service supposedly isn't running (it _is_ running). I've tried a couple of fixes I found out on some fairly reputable sites, like scanning the system files (sfc /scannow -- errors can't be fixed) doing a dummy in place upgrade using other Windows 7 ultimate media (Windows 7 can't be configured to run this system), manually updating the Windows installer (suggested by Microsoft, errors out immediately). Being creative, I downloaded Windows 7's SP1, and that looked hopeful until it also errored out.
This has been a great portable workhorse computer, and I use it occasionally for games, so I hate to just ditch it and install Linux, but I'm getting just about that frustrated. If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate it. I'm fairly tech-brave, and I work on Windows at the Enterprise level, so have a bit of know how if you bring me some stuff to try. Google brought me here in addition to some other sites, so I've already done a bit of homework.
Thanks in advance for anything you may be able to give me. If I need to start a new thread, I'm sure someone here will let me know.
Dweomere
2 Posts
0
May 25th, 2015 07:00
Update: I see I left out my pertinent system information -- Alienware m11x -- 1st edition. Moving from original 200gb sata drive to 500gb Crucial SSD.
I tried another approach, this time booting with the recovery DVD that I made from my original factory disk. Same issues. I've looked at the accepted solution early in this thread, and may give that a try next. I have another idea that looks easier, since I'd already taken the time to download the driver files for this system.
Questions: I see 2 system images in the folder you indicated."factory.wmi" & "factory2.wmi" is this a span between 2 files, or is it actually a second image?
If it's 2 images: Should I move one image out of the path and try to get the restore going on the right one by process of elimination, in case one is corrupt and the other not?