Reinstalling from factory image

Hi, I'm replacing my HDD with dual Momentus XT's. I know AlienRespawn lets you copy the factory image on an 8GB flash stick and was wondering if I could install from the factory image to a formated HDD? Does the AlienRespawn recovery partition need to be present for that to work?

Thanks.

 

Just boot from the USb stick. Should be fine. Ive read that alot of people have had trouble installing the factory image on to a smaller drive. Not sure about a bigger one though.

 

All right, thanks. If I do a clean install, is there a way to install the AlienRespawn partition? And yes, I know some consider it bloatware

 

Clean install? No. You will have to use your AlienRespawn image to restore AlienRespawn so that it can be reused. A Catch-22 if you will.

 

Ok, thanks. I guess the question now is factory image or clean install ........

 

I'd say factory image as all the drivers will be pre installed. Clean install may mean less bloat but you'd need to sift through and get drivers for everything downloaded and then installed - guess whole process would take ages!

 

Well, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that's what the Driver disc is for, the factory image contains all of the drivers contained on the disc.

 

Also, this may be a stupid question, but is there a speed difference installing the factory image from a USB 3.0 flash drive over a USB 2.0 or does it only apply to copying (read/write) files?

 

No difference unless you have a USB 3 memory stick.

Also, the driver disk does not contain all the software. Stuff like Roxio, PowerDVD and the cam software can only be accessed from your laptop service tag associated with your dell login at smartsource.dell.com

I played around with both methods and the respawn is easier but restricted to whatever mode they originally setup the system in. Mine was set to RAID in the bios and while it would restore in AHCI mode the resulting bootable drive only worked if the bios was set to RAID, I prefer AHCI so I used the restore DVD that comes with the system and manually loaded the drivers. Once you get everything setup perfectly you can backup the system on that state with Alien Respawn so a future restore will go much faster.

Cheers,

 

So, as I understand it, I CANNOT setup my Momentus XT's in RAID if I use the factory image because it was originally installed on a single drive. Is that correct?

So basically, I made the recovery flash drive. Now I want to remove my 320GB HDD and install the two Momentus drives. If I use the recovery image, I won't have my drives in RAID but could I set them up afterwards? Also, if I do a clean install and set up my drives in RAID, I won't be able to get AlienRespawn back because the Recovery Partition is missing...

 

I don't see why not. It's setup in RAID by default just no drive are added to an array. It uses the Intel RAID drivers already not the inbox MS AHCI driver.

 

So, I installed the hard drives and configured a RAID 0 volume. Now every time it boots I get the "For atheros pcie ethernet controller - check cable connection!" error. Also, it won't read my USB factory image, gives me an internal error. Is this because there is no AlienRespawn partition available? Should I clean install and then install the factory image?

EDIT: Scratch the error, I realized it's trying to do a Network boot... what about the factory image?

 

You could put the factory 320GB in an esata enclosure (for speed but usb will work), configure the raid set in the bios, use acronis or other cloning technology to clone the factory drive to the new raid set. In this way the raid set will have the recovery and boot partitions.

Are you saying it does not see any bootable partitions and is trying to do a network boot because it can't find any other bootable drive?

Please be specific. What steps did you take to setup the raid 0 and how did you install the Windows OS onto the raid set?

Cheers,

 

I made an AlienRespawn recovery flash drive. Then I took out the 320GB drive and installed the Momentus drives. I went in the RAID setup using Ctrl+I and set the drives in RAID 0 volume. Then tried to boot from the recovery flash drive and get the following message: "An internal error has occured. The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002)". So I have to clean install from the DVD, which I have not done yet...

So I'm wondering if I can't use the recovery flash drive because the AlienRespawn partition is not present. Is there a way to create the partition again?

 

OK, The Respawn to USB is very inconsistent. The DVDs work much more reliably. Even so, assuming you did not erase the original drive you can still use Acronis or other cloning software to copy the data to the new raid set. Of course that costs money and assumes you have an external USB enclosure and another computer to create the bootable acronis usb stick or CD.

You can also remove both new drives and reinstall the original drive boot up and create the respawn DVDs.

Cheers,

 

Ha, I would have never figured the USB would be a problem... so it's definitely not the recovery partition missing that's the problem? I'll make a recovery DVD and give it a go, thanks!

 

Yeah, the USB sticks are very unreliable. I have a couple of Kingston 8GB sticks and neither would boot successfully (colorful Windows dots would start to appear and then crash). Used a 16GB Sandisk Titanium (top of the line in its day) and it was able to handle one restore. All future attempts claimed the Windows installation was missing or corrupt.

DVDs work fine everytime as does acronis. I keep a spare drive with just the factory load and a bootable acronis USB stick for cloning purposes. I have several drives in eSATA housings so I run several different Windows configs as tests. I don't load new drivers on my main drive until they've been tested at least a week on an external clone of my current config. I also maintain a running Acronis backup on a 2TB eSATA drive. Are you a trend. I DO NOT want a disk failure to cost me time or data. I keep a full copy of the systems off site as well.

I'm sure you'll be fine with the DVDs. It's a much better program than ASUS. The restore media on my G73 would only restore to the same size disk as the original system disk.

Cheers,

 

Figured it out, I was using a USB 3.0 flash drive in a 3.0 port, switched to the 2.0 port and it worked! In any case, thanks for all the help.

 

Good catch, I didn't check for that. Could be why I had inconsistent behavior.

Cheers,

 

Confirmed, everything installed fine. I guess it won't install a factory image from a flash drive if it's in the USB 3.0 port, even if the drive is USB 3.0.

Btw, I'm impressed at the minimal amount of bloat on the machines. All I can see is Roxio Creator Starter. Anyone use that, any good? Never used any burning software and the reviews look pretty bad...

 

I uninstalled it and installed IMGburn instead.