Cannot restore from recovery partition

Hi everyone. I have an Alienware m17x R3, and yesterday I formatted the partition that contained my primary Windows installation. Upon starting the Windows 7 installation process, the system recovery tools would not let me access my recovery partition (which was created through Alien Respawn, which I suspect is the reason why it didn't recognize it). I tried to instead do a clean install of windows, but after the installation was complete it said that Windows would not work for my hardware setup. I have since installed Ubuntu, and I tried using Gparted to boot from the recovery partition, but it has failed to boot.

In short:

I don't have Windows 7 installed and I am unable to reinstall it successfully
My recovery partition is still intact

Any suggestions you have would all be greatly appreciated. If you need more information, I'd be happy to provide it. Thank you.

 

I keep reading recovery *partition*, but did you create recovery DVDs or a recovery USB stick with Alien Respawn?

Also, the reasoning behind the initial format of your system may help solve some problems... Why did you feel the need to start fresh?

 

I did not create any recovery DVDs nor did I create a USB stick with Alien Respawn. However, the last time I formatted my computer (over the summer, when a loose RAM stick caused a crash in the middle of a system update) I was able to recover using Alien Respawn even though I had not made any recovery discs/USB sticks at the time.

My reasoning for formatting at this time was that certain things on my computer were acting up, for example my internet would cut out for 2-3 seconds every minute or two, and no other computers on my network were experiencing this. I figured that restoring to factory settings would fix all of that.

 

Alien Respawn is unfortunately a poor backup program. If you cannot access it by hitting the F8 key (I think that is the right one), then it is probably toast, in that case, I would delete the partition by booting the Windows 7 install disk, delete all partitions and then do a fresh install. If you want Respawn back, you can call Dellianware and they can do it remotely. I would recommend just using the Windows 7 backup, it works fine.

Once you have installed windows, use the guide in the stickies to re-install the drivers.

 

Well I'm downloading WAIK right now to try and restore it with imagex, but if that doesn't't work then I really will have to just wipe everything and try to get it working.

 

So, having not found any easy solutions on the interwebz (besides the convoluted instructions for getting Imagex out of WAIK) I came up with my own, fully functional, counter-intuitive solution:

I copied the Factory.wim image onto my Linux partition. Then in Linux I created an NTFS partition where I wanted to place Windows. I renamed Factory.wim to Factory.7z, opened it with 7zip, and extracted all of the files to my new NTFS partition.

And it worked!

Anyways, I might make this into a full on guide for people who want to restore from .wim images without dealing with all that imagex bullcrap. Basically what would have taken me 3-5 hours was fixed in 15 minutes.

 

So, are you still planning to make a guide for this? I think it may be helpful to many if it works and can be replicated.

 

I was able to follow what you said and extracted the "Factory.wim" files using 7-zip from my Respawn recovery partition. Extracting them to an empty NTFS partition to house Windows worked beautifully. I did this while booting from eSATA. I now have Respawn (a "factory installation") on my Crucial M4 SSD. I did this after using Acronis to copy the two small factory partitions to the SSD, which left the remainder of the drive available for Windows.

 

Wait did you do this for testing or did you get a new M4 and wanted to use it as the boot drive?

My M3 is arriving in an hour along with my 120g M4 and I would really like to find the easiest way to transfer everything. I'm afraid if I do full reinstall and format that drivers will screw me somehow magically haha.

 

No, I just did it for testing. It worked great in principle.

I did a clean install afterward because my factory Alien Respawn was intended for a regular HDD and the overall performance on the SSD (M4) was not quite as good when using a regular HDD installation. It would be great method to use on a regular HDD. Installing Windows 7 from scratch allows it to properly optimize and align the OS to work with an SSD.

 

Bumping thread... with all the new models starting to ship/deliver, this may be of interest.