AlienRespawn DVD keeps your HD empty?

Hi

normaly 10-20gb of youre HDD space is used by AlienRespawn.
If you have an AlienRespawn DVD:

is there still an AlienRespawnBackup on the HDD?
do you need the Backup on the HDD?
can it be deleted?
would it make sence to delete it?

Thanks for your help!

Greetings
Julian

 

i dont have a backup made by the dvd. i deleted the alienrespawn.

 

If you delete the one on the HD is gone for good. But, if you have the Respawn DVD then you can use it whenever you wish.

 

it would make sense to delete it IF YOU BOUGHT THE DVD.

which you seem to have. so yes.

AFAIK the contents of the respawn partition is the same as the DVD. (more or less, the bootloader is different I think)

enjoy.

 

THX @ all! You helped me alot!

One last question ... how can I delet the Backup on the HDD? Do I have to reinstall Vista?

Greetings
Julian

 

So does the alien respawn DVD include Vista and some necessary drivers for M17?

 

It includes vista, the drivers are on another disc.

 

I found the reswpawn to just be an image of the hard drive...when I used it my system was like the first time I started it, drivers installed and such. I think you only need the driver disk if you use the MS Vista install disc to do a clean install instead fo the Respawn...

I deleted mine because I found it just as easy to do a fresh install and get the updated drivers from the net...

 

No.

Go to Control Panel's Administrative Tools, and select Computer Management; on the left find "disk management" under "storage" ... after a minute it will load on the right hand side with all your drives installed. on the left portion of the lower centre of the display, you'll see "disk 0" with a few partitions to the right of it, probably including "C:" somewhere, on the far right you'll see the EISA partition, select it, right click and Select "Delete Volume"... that's not enough to recover the space.

after that, right click on C: and select "Extend Volume" and extend it to the full size of the disk.

This should recover all of the AlienRespawn space back to your primary partition (C .

I believe it has relevant drivers for your system slipstreamed into it... Not sure if EVERYTHING is included... (I've never actually used mine) but you should be pretty much setup to the original install state (or very close to it) from a respawn install.

I'd like to note that the respawn disks are NOT JUST VISTA RECOVERY DISKS. they are fully customized by Alienware, and the only option after starting from CD is where to in stall and "are you sure?" there is a separate vista recovery CD shipped with the system (all systems afaik), that will do boot recovery and whatnot (afaik). if you don't get the respawn disk, then you can use the vista recovery + driver CD (shipped with the system) to effectively do the same thing.

 

Thanks Mystik! That was a beautiful answer and very helpful info. +rep

 

Disk management will do the job. But I recommend using fdisk utility when you reinstall vista. I just don't trust Disk management to do it properly resulting in lower hard drive speed. Most will say it does the same thing but I agree and disagree. Depending on the size of your hard drive you got you may want to keep the EISA partition until you run out of space. If you Install vista using the Alien Restore DVD that all good, but it's going to be slow going. Also, You will loose your MBR, which gives you the option to use Alien Respawn 2.0.
No problem, in this case use the Alien Respawn 2.0 DVD and it will load you a new MBR then opt to let you respawn from either the EISA partition or the DVD (Hard Drive is faster).
Hamish33 was exactly correct on how the DVD's work. If you remove the EISA partition I suggest you look into something like Acronis True Image Home or the equivalent. I also suggest splitting up the hard drive into 2 partitions. A second partiton could be used for data backup you want to keep if you need to erase and reinstall windows a second time. The second partition is also good for keeping future images of your primary partition.

EDIT: On my 250 gig HD I left the EISA partition (8.6gig) and partitoned 50 gig for the OS (more than enough) and used the rest for D:/ which I will keep my documents, music, pictures, ect. Basically, stuff I do not ever wish to remove from the computer.

 

you just cornfused me....

you saying you have your HD divided into 3 parts? am i right in understanding then that if you reinstall vista on the one part it will not erase any data that you have under D:/ ??

and just for giggles and such - what is EISA?

 

so thank you all alot one more time!

My biggest problem is I only had mony left for T9400 and Crossfire so I had to be happy with 160GB ... not realy mutch ... so I need every space I can get ... first I thougt of an external HDD but now I am thinking of a second HDD for the m17 ... do I lose warenty when I install one by my self? (If it isn't from AW)

Greetings
Julian

(+reps are following soon )

 

warranty should not be an issue if your adding an additional HD.
the only thing is that if you need to have it sent in, you may need to remove the additional HD since it was not part of the original config. nothing huge really.

 

That is correct Respawn 2.0 restores the data on drive C AND the MBR. Drive D or any other drive you create is unaffected. Yes Technically, my hard drive has 3 partitions C, D and the EISA partition. The EISA partition is the one that has the Respawn 2.0 backup image.

An EISA partition is a (hidden) partition that contains utilities that can be accessed from the BIOS or by a special boot choice during startup.

 

I'm not sure how that could possibly lower harddrive speed. I've repartitioned NTFS disks with windows management as well as gparted, never experienced any slow-downs. by default, a larger harddrive size = bigger MFTs, which mean longer parsing times to find files, more lookups, etc. this could all boil down to slower speeds for the disk, but that's really dependent on how much data there is, and the differences are negligible.

I've seen a lot of people do this... mostly younger lads who can't buy/don't have access to external or additional storage space. When reformatting, I spend, on average, an hour locating and backing up relevant data. Luckily, I've discovered the joys of using the windows default folders (My documents, etc) which has, for the most part, streamlined my backup procedure. Now I just archive My Documents (more appropriately, my user folder, so I get all of my docs, favourites, etc) to my server, produce a list of installed programs (so I don't have to seek them out as I need them), then format.

It's a valid suggestion to partition like that, and people that switch OSes a lot find it useful (a-la Linux/Unix users and their /home folders). EISA is like a harddrive version of a CD ISO... I don't know what the letters really mean (I'm sure you could look it up), but yeah, effectively that's it. usually holds a DVD/CD image, that's why usually they're ~8.5GB... which would be a dual-layer DVD.

I just wanted to back up ryujin on this one.

the AW KB article is here:
http://4help.alienware.com/cgi-bin/alienware.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5918

... it's for a reseating of the harddrives, but it should have all the info you'd need to add another disk.... Just make sure you get the right kind of disk... a 2.5" (or "laptop"/"notebook" drive) SATA.

Enjoy!