Hi All,

I agreed to help a friend restore her Dell Inspiron 1545 to factory condition after she got a virus, but I believe that her Factory.wim is corrupt. I used the following command (since I couldn't find PCRestore.exe in the recovery partition):

imagex /apply E:\DELL\Images\Factory.wim 1 C:\

It seemed to complete (got to 100%, said it was successful) but when I rebooted vista got stuck in a reboot loop; if I tried startup repair it would go to a BSOD with STOP error 0xc000021a. I have looked up this error and tried the Disable AHCI trick but it did not have any noticeable effect.

I reformatted and tried it again, but this time used the /check and /verify flags, and this time it would only get to 2% before bailing (C:\dell\delay.exe extracted size doesn't match stated size or something like that). Again, I can leave off the flags and it will look like it completed but it would get stuck in a reboot loop or come up with a STOP error. Interestingly I can run it with just the /check flag and it does not display the error, but if I use the /verify flag it will error at 2% every time (same file as well).

I ran some diagnostics on the drive and I am nearly certain it is not at fault (tests came back okay); however if there is something wrong with the drive will I be able to replace it through warranty?

Is there anything I can do to fix this image (if it is even corrupt)? If I cannot fix it, is there somewhere I can download it from? She did not recieve OS discs with her computer (or does not know where there are). I really would like to avoid purchasing vista if there is a way to get the image from Dell.

Thank you,

neocpp