Hi All, 

I just had a very interesting interaction with support over my 2021 XPS 13 9310. It seems that Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery no longer functions as originally designed.

I had completely "flattened" the Micron 2300 512GB NVMe that came with the laptop to put Ubuntu on it as an experiment. When I attempted to flatten it again to put Windows 11 back on it using an SAOS USB stick, I found that rather then attempt to use the image on the USB stick, SAOS forced a "cloud download", and promptly failed at the OS validation/download step. Rather than explain why this was occurring, Support sent out a Technician with a new SSD, and it was replaced with one that was pre-imaged.  Now, although this is great, and gets me the recovery partition back, it doesn't really answer the initial question of why the service offered by Dell no longer functions as expected. 

Has anyone else experienced this challenge, and if so, were you able to overcome it, and how?  Yes, I do have another USB stick with Windows 11 that I created using the Microsoft Media Creation tool, and it works perfectly fine, but it won't get me the original, Dell Recovery partition back. 

Thanks much, 

Laurence M. Schwarz