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    M17xR4 Crashed and USB Recovery Media won't work

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by pacostyle, Nov 5, 2013.

  1. pacostyle

    pacostyle Newbie

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    Hi guys, I got a problem while trying to upgrade my M17x with an SSD as boot drive. Hope you can help me! I apologize in advance if i mispell something, English is not my first language; i am italian :rolleyes:
    Btw here's the problem:

    I bought a 500gb Samsung 840 EVO for using it as primary drive with the old Seagate 500gb HDD as storage drive ( D: ).
    So i followed a guy's hints on youtube on how to do this ( Welcome to Japhistan - YouTube). He suggested, once you installed the ssd, to just clone Win7 with all the drivers to the new drive using AlienRespawn recovery USB previously created. I followed the process but i got stuck in the restoring part. When the recovery USB was doing his work i got an error message 20131105_091213.jpg .

    I assumed there was some incompatibility with the Win7 image and the SSD so I decided to give up.
    But when I tried to boot the HDD windows gave me some kind of error that i dont remember asking me to insert the windows install cd and do a repair. I tried to reboot and thing got even worse, windows disappeared! There was only the bios screen saying "No bootable device. Check connection cable"
    Probably the recovery USB utility was formatting the HDD before i got that error so it corrupted windows (instead it was supposed to format the SSD and clone the Win7 image)
    So i decided to grab the Windows7 Home Premium SP1 installation DVD that came with the laptop and do a clean reinstall. But here i failed hard: it was late night and i was tired and angry and i involuntarily damaged the DVD while opening it. I did a bad scratch on it but i tried to run it anyway.
    The windows installer utility start but doesen't complete the installation as it says some files are missing.
    So i tried to run the recovery utility and i managed to see the HDD partition: the Recovery one is still there! But windows doesn't see it. 20131104_235452.jpg


    So in short: i have a (badly i think) formatted HDD with Recovery partition still on it that windows doesn't see and my USB Recovery Media doens't work i don't know why. Also my Windows 7 DVD is gone. What do?

    Sorry for the long post, hope you can help me!
     
  2. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    I would suggest to do a fresh install, cloning is not the best option when moving from HDD to SDD.
     
  3. pacostyle

    pacostyle Newbie

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    Finally i managed to get a Win7 install DVD and a I did a fresh install.
    I installed all the drivers and stuff but i'm wondering how to get the suite that comes preinstalled with the laptop. Like AlienAutopsy, AlienRespawn and so on. Can you help me?