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    Restoring Alienware M17x R2 Partitions

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by fish221171, Sep 30, 2010.

  1. fish221171

    fish221171 Newbie

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    Hi,

    I am selling my Dell Alienware M17x R2 on and I would like to reset everything back to how it was when I got it. But I wiped out the partitions and setup windows myself (the data recovery from Dell has gone).

    But as I am selling this on I would like to put the machine back to how it is when purchased from Dell/Alienware.

    Can anyone guide me on this or point me in the right direction.

    Thanks
     
    fish221171, Sep 30, 2010
    #1
  2. dave-p

    dave-p Notebook Deity

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    Do you have restore CDs ? or a copy of the Windows CD ?
     
    dave-p, Sep 30, 2010
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  3. BatBoy

    BatBoy Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Once you wipe out the recovery partition, its gone. There is no way to restore the system to an 'out of box' state unless you imaged the drive using a third party app. even if you have the Dell/AW OS disc, it will not restore the recovery partition.


    Sorry.
     
    BatBoy, Sep 30, 2010
    #3
  4. ghostdunks

    ghostdunks Notebook Guru

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    slightly off topic, but I'm about to take delivery of my m17x in next few days and I had a couple of questions on the default factory partition, etc..:

    1) Do I need special software to take a whole image of the drive(recovery partition + default install) and save the image to a USB drive? Just asking because I'm used to Windows XP and NTFS/FAT32 and I usually just Ghost my installs. Not sure if combination of Windows 7+SSD requires something a bit different.

    2) After I've imaged the drive, I was looking to just turf the recovery partition, to "recover" the space, and just extend the primary default partition to cover the recovered space. Is this possible, and do I need special software to do this, or can I just use one of the usual partitioning software(PartitionMagic, Acronis, etc..) to do this?
     
    ghostdunks, Oct 4, 2010
    #4