HOW TO: Preserve AlienRespawn - stock drive to aftermarket drive / AlienRespawn Q&A

Not sure, I lost trying with Windows 8. Do you by chance have Dell Solid State Drives?

 

Nope. Standard 500gb Seagate drive.
I gave up and installed Win7 clean. Managed to find an iso. Might try respawn now and see how that works.

 

Quick question,
if you already did created the respawn DVDs from the first boot, could you do a DBAN wipe of the drive for example, and still do a respawn from the DVDs created earlier? Or does it depend on those partitions to remain intact?

 

Hi ped... yes, you sure can. Once you have created Respawn recovery media you can use the DVD or USB recovery media to reinstall Windows to a factory state. The original partitions are not required and it does not need to be the same HDD or SSD as the original drive. You don't need to wipe your drive because Respawn recovery media will wipe out everything, create new partitions, etc.

 

I'd love to know what is causing the IDS GUI overlay problem. I haven't tried Win 8 again as of yet but Respawn seems to work correctly for some and not for others.

@Mr. Fox - were you able to successfully re-install AWR without corruption to the GUI?

 

Yes, I was. Whether I could replicate the success a second or third time is anyone's guess. Installation was failing with an error message that AlienRespawn could not be installed because the "Windows Recovery Environment" was not present. I installed the Windows 8 Assessment and Deployment Kit, which includes the latest Windows PE. After that, AlienRespawn installed without a hitch. I haven't tried wiping my drives to see if the same process will work a second time yet... I'm just enjoying the fact that I finally got it working.

My impression is that there is nothing at all wrong with AlienRespawn and the problems are entirely a bug with Windows 8. I don't see an option to include the "Windows Recovery Environment" during a Windows 8 Pro installation. Life might be a lot easier if Micro$oft were to just include that in a default Windows 8 installation routine.

 

Nex time I try Win8, I'll give that d/l a shot...see if makes a difference regarding the GUI being fubar.

 

Thanks for the quick reply Mr. Fox.

Great to know, in fact the reason I wanted to do that was to use DBAN to wipe any trace of perso data, and then use the respawn recovery dvds to bring it to a factory state. So even the original user can create alienspawn dvds if they desire.

Very nice tip. Appreciate the detail.

Cheers,
-ped

 

I thought it would be good to follow up on my May 11 post about AlienwareRespawn.

I had no issues whatsoever with the Windows 7 version and liked it enough to purchase it. It worked flawlessly for me and I was very pleased with.

Unfortunately, I cannot say that about the Windows 8 version of Respawn. I have removed it and reclaimed the recovery partition drive space. Other than not liking the look of the ugly new Metro UI theme, it was buggy and would not "Respawn" to a partition smaller than the original. (This was a recent discovery. My Respawn media would not work.) I did not have that problem with the latest Windows 7 version. It was difficult to get installed under Windows 8 because it did not find the "Recovery Environment." Again, with the Windows 7 version I never had that issue. I fault issues with Windows 8 for it not working properly more so than SoftThinks. SoftThinks provides backup and recovery software for many other OEMs including Acer, Gateway, HP, in addition to Dell/Alienware.

If you are a Windows 7 user, here is a link for the good version: [ Download|AlienwareRespawn Basic for Windows 7] - This version does not work with Windows 8.

 

I have never used AlienRespawn because every time I have bought an Alienware computer I could not get the hard drive setup I wanted from Dell so I have always done a clean install of Windows to new drives. the first thing I do is install Norton Ghost and copy the C drive in the new computer. Then install the new HDD /SSD and install Windows then all the drivers, then Norton 360 followed by Ghost and then MS office and Adobe. I update Windows and office then do a "one time backup" with Ghost. This backup goes onto a portable hard drive with the name "clean" and the date along with the original disk image. That way no matter what happens in the future I can always get back to a clean installation if I need to.

 

Well i need to give it a try today.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Well, I don't really know how AlienRespawn works, but I have a further question about it.

I have 4 partitions In my Alienware M11x R2 (i5,8gb,256ssd win8 64bit) laptop:

1) Recovery partition of about 6.07gb (100% free) probably made by Windows 8.

2) Windows 8 partition (43gb after I shrinked it)

3) Data partition (181gb) - I created it myself.

4) Alienrespawn Recovery partition (8gb) - I created after installing all the drivers/apps using Alienrespawn.

Alienrespawn took a chunk of the data partition and allocated 8GB for the recovery drive. If I use AlienRespawn, I know that it will restore a computer back to its original factory configuration, meaning that it will restore the Windows 8 partition to its original factory configuration. What about Data partition? Will AlienRespawn erase Data partition? Or, it will not affect the Data partition? I tried pressing F8 during bootup but it didn't take me to the recovery console. What could be the problem? Secondly what do I do with the partition made by windows 8 for recovery, should I delete it and recover that space? How?
Regards

 

Hey guys , one short question . I am after clean windows install .

I downloaded and installed alienrespawn and once after installation i think there was a progress with creating a system backup. I did not even do anything and after it finished i now have a new Recovery Partition with 8.48 GB and one more with 300 MB also. I did not ask for it and thought that after clean install if i want to make a sytem backup i will have to buy premium version of this app.

1.Did it create system backup (like factory settings for now ) and i can always use it in future ? When i clicked an option to restore system there was a file with log that it was just created but will it proceed and intall when i need it ?

2. If i decide to buy premium version and just create it on image and move it to some external hdd will i be able to delete those recovery partitions again and move it back to my ssd free space?

Thx and sorry for my activity lately but question simply arive all the time in my head after buying this alienware setup and i found this forum the most useful.

 

Yes, after a clean installation your new installation of AlienRespawn created a new backup. It will be a backup of your new installation and not a factory system backup. The original 300MB partition includes the Windows Recovery Environment and it is required for AlienRespawn to function. This should work fine. It has for me in the past. AlienRespawn is a good program that works quite well for recovery purposes to restore data to the original partition. It is not designed as a disk imaging program or comprehensive data management tool.

The best option for disaster recovery and data imaging is to use a program such as Acronis True Image or Macrium Reflect. I own and like both disk imaging utilities. You can create a disk image on an internal data drive or external USB and reclaim the disk space that is being used by AlienRespawn.

 

AlienRespawn just screwed me over

I was trying to restore the C: drive and instead it wiped and reinstalled everything on my E: drive

from what I can tell whatever idiot programmed this software just assumed that Disk 0 would always be the C: drive, I just lost so much media and am really really upset

 

Ouch! Sorry that happened. Time to get rid of Respawn and reclaim the wasted drive space. I would use Acronis TrueImage or Macrium Reflect. I own and use both and they are great. Their free versions also work well.

 

I will definitely have to look into that soon, right now it seems a clean install did not fix the problem I was having with my Alienware though so I'm going to have to contact tech support (it keeps restarting itself randomly and so far it seems only when idle though that might be a coincidence)

 

If you have not already done so, try going into the BIOS and choose the option to set defaults. See if the restart problem goes away with setup defaults.

 

I did update the BIOS finally to A03 but that doesn't seem to have helped, according to BlueScreenView the BSOD is being caused by ntoskrnl.exe and tcpip.sys so it seems to be related to the network card

hoping that it's just the wired network driver and switching back to wireless will fix it (I had started using ethernet cable instead of wireless recently)

 

From what I gather, AlienRespawn recovery (stored on HDD) fails to restore because the disk size was changed. Will this still happen if I reduce the size of C: to create another partition?
Will the recovery stored on optical media fail as well?
(I am not changing disks but reducing size of boot partition)

 

just got new aw 17. have 500gb samsung ssd to install. want to keep 1tb 5.4k and 80gb cache as "media drive". alienrespawn recovery dvd's have been made. everytime i go to restore. it just wants to restore over the original drive. so it seems. is there a way to keep the drive in there or am i going to have to remove the original drives. load to the ssd. replace the drives back in the system. then wipe them and go on? really? i called alienware support and he just said that no matter what it will just overwrite to the original disk. i want to choose which disk is the default boot. can it do that or not?

man. i sure wish i could use my corporate premier account and get support that actually knows something. sigh.

 

well. that didn't go so well. i guess i'm now going to try installing from the actual windows 8.1 disk as well as their resource cd. boot was all messed up. who knows what drive it tried to install to. there were so many partitions. i formatted the 1tb drive and am now hopefully installing to the ssd. but i have no idea. literally like 10 partitions.

 

You need to remove the old drives before running respawn or it will try to install to the original drive.

 

I may have to give AlienRespawn a go. I have a 1 TB SSD that I'm replacing the 500 GB with and I was just going to do a fresh install but I'm willing to give it a try.

 

How'd that go for you? I struggled and wasted several hours trying to make a 250gb SSD my new boot drive and have taken several trips on the failboat before reloading from the factory DVD and cutting my losses. Not worth the hours of hassle to try and retain the handful of applications when the Dell recovery disks provide a fairly simple (albeit manual) method, at least for a new system.

Try 1:
Samsung Data Migration Wizard
Booted with both drives and everything seemingly intact, but the system began behaving very erratically (things wouldn't open). Booted back from the original drive and gave up for the night.

Try 2:
Alienware Respawn
Both drives intact in the system (hadn't read this post yet). Bought the Premium edition Respawn, source is a 120gb msata drive in a small USB enclosure, target is a 250gb Samsung ssd. Refused to restore onto the SSD and kept erroring around. It did create several partitions, I nuked them manually and retried, no bueno.

Try 3:
Internal SSD + msata for the bootable recovery, removed the original hard drive, still had goo on the target drive (several partitions), nuked them, proceeded with Respawn, and it looked like it worked. Windows 8.1 kept booting into a recovery mode and basically refused to start despite trying system repair and a few other options.

Try 4:
Macrium Reflect - original 500GB drive + new 250gb SSD. This seemed most promising initially although the 500 gb source drive had 6 partitions (!) on it, which is uh crazy would be my only word for it. Macrium would not clone all of them, so I unchecked the PBR partition (Windows 8 has push button restore in case your computer gets well and truly hosed, you can quickly recover) and cloned the remaining. Removed the source 500gb drive and the newly created SSD would not boot at all.

Try 5:
Pave and reload - this isn't actually that painful but admittedly the machine is brand new.

What's most troubling here is that Alienware Respawn is billed as a tool to manage this process seamlessly. As a free tool, best-effort is possibly okay, but once you start charging people, the expectation is that it works for common scenarios. I can't believe my scenario is uncommon, consider myself of average or better intelligence, and couldn't get this to work.

I've done SSD upgrades on several systems in the past including laptops and never had this kind of trouble, normally with the free utility Samsung provides. There appears to be something unique in how Dell partitions and installs that makes this more difficult than it should be. Could also be a combination of these partitions, hardware and Windows 8, but doubt (from past experience), the latter isn't really a factor.

Good luck to anyone heading down this path, if you happen upon a successful formula, it'd be great to document for posterity so that others may benefit.

 

Here's from another thread I started:

Alienrespawn wouldn't work, from the factory, so I ended up doing a clean install. I'm thinking the problem is with Windows 8.1 but I didn't want to waste hours and hours trying to troubleshoot it so I just bit the bullet as you did.

 

Drive size is pretty critical when it comes to respawning from recovery media. If the machine originally had a larger drive, say a 750gb HDD, and you try and use recovery media to a drive of different capacity, the process just fails. I presume it's because the original partitions that have been imaged cannot be squeezed on to a smaller capacity drive. I think it works the same in reverse - small to large - the program just does not acknowledge drives of differing capacities that vary from the original recovery image. I don't think Dell have made the effort to allow respawn to recognize and install successfully to a different size drive - probably because it's all about 'original factory condition' and a user upgrading their machine to aftermarket SSD's are essentially changing from original configuration, and that is something Dell do not concern themselves with - hence the fact that AWR doesn't take kindly to a new drive with different capacity. It would be nice if they tweaked AWR to allow this, but I doubt Dell would burn the calories on doing so. When I had a 500gb HDD and an aftermarket 512gb SSD, AWR worked fine - perhaps as the drives were so close in capacity that it made no difference.

Anyway, I know this involves a bit of legwork and a clean install, but here's what I did recently with Windows 8 - my machine shipped with 7 HP, but from my previous M18x R1, I had a Windows 8 (not 8.1) USB drive that I created when Micro$haft were offering 8 for $14.99 with free Media Player for a limited time. Note, I had already created USB media for my 7 install and stashed it before I did step (ii) below:

i) Boot from Win 8 USB
ii) Proceed to install OS after deleting all partitions so the HDD was completely unallocated space
iii) Complete OS install (activation of key required a call to the MS automated activation wizard as my Win 8 install was previously on another machine - few minutes and it's easily re-activated via the wizard)
iv) Update Windows to 8.1.1 & add Media Center
v) Install all relevant drivers from Dell Drivers & Downloads
vi) Download and install AlienRespawn from here: AlienRespawn | Dell US
vii) Create new recovery media using AlienRespawn - a new recovery partition is created on the drive, regardless of drive capacity, as this is essentially a clean install.

That's given me a bang up to date recovery USB with 8.1.1 which I can use anytime to roll back to a 'user created' factory image that reflects a clean install - no need to ever go through the above process of downloading and installing drivers etc......if I ever want to revert, I can just boot from my user created respawn image. You can use whatever OS you like, makes no difference - I just wanted a Win 8.1.1 recover image to hand for future use.

Of course, the initial process is more convoluted than simply respawning from the original factory image because of the clean install required, but I think that the hour or so that it takes is well worth doing - regardless of the size of the new drive that is being used.

 

is this still good in 2014?

 

i have alienware system and i changed the drive.

1) installed the Dell Alienware OS from original DVD provided
2)Installed all the drivers and programs i use

3) CAN I JUST SIMPLY download Alien Respawn from here ( AlienRespawn | Dell US) and install it?

 

Yes, that should work just fine. It should create a new recovery partition for you and then allow you to create a 'user' factory recovery USB (or DVD's) based on your new OS installation. Depending on the size of your image, you will need a USB large enough for that - AWR will prompt you for the size required. Normally, a Dell factory image typically requires an 8gb USB drive or two DVD's (not re-writeable ones) or one BD if you have a Blu Ray burner.

As an example, I loaded a few other programs etc after my OS install, ended up with a 10gb+ image after installing AWR so I used a 16gb USB to make my new 'user' backup.

 

tnx!

 

I'm planning to buy an Alienware 17 and get an aftermarket SSD.
I gather from this thread that Alienrespawn doesn't work well for most of us from HDD to SSD.
I'm reluctant to re-install the OS because I'll lose the Alienware customisation and I'll be left with the stock Win 8.1 OS.

Is there any other aftermarket products out there (free or something reasonably priced) which the forummers have had a good experience with?
Thanks!

 

Acronis True Image is a good one, but you can easily restore the 'Alienware' feel yourself: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...er-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html

 

Ok, AlienRespawn guru's, I have some questions.

I have a internal SSD and HDD. The OS lives on the SSD, my Steam library on the HDD.

I have a 5TB external USB drive with my iTunes and Lightroom libraries.

I DO have another external HDD with the system restore and 'constant data protection' images, but I am away from them for the next three weeks.

I need to do a rebuild now. I am getting blue screens every few hours.

My questions are...

Can I run a full backup of my current system to my existing 5TB external drive? Will AlienRespawn erase that drive before it uses it?

Doesn't it repartition the drive you select for system restore disks? Will that destroy existing data?

I have the premium version and I would like to do a full system backup (system/data) before doing the restore.

Thanks.

 

I've upgraded my Aw17 with a Samsung 840 SSD 500Gb, but i lost AlienRespawn. I've used Samsung Data Migration software, it's works wlel but now my recovery partition was lost. I've read this thread and make an USB bootable (with AlienRespawn) before upgrading. I don't know why, but it doesn't work, it not reconized by system when booting.

I can keep my system like this, without AlienRespawn partition. I've the recovery DVD inside the box, is them same as the partition?

 

If you are booting using UEFI without Legacy Option ROM your DOS-bootable USB thumb drives don't work. You need the USB stick to be formatted with for EFI boot or it will be ignored. You can try enabling the Legacy Option ROM in the BIOS and see if the recovery media is bootable.

 

Thanks Mr.Fox, i'll try it this evening. Yes, when i booting with USB stick i see an EFI menù with my Pc's name. But when i select it it says "no system found" (or something like this).

I forgot to say that i see another 2 partitions, 750Mb and 500Mb. But they are empty.

After reading other posts, i've reliazed was better to put SSD into second bay slot, then switch boot order. I've instead replaced the orginal HDD.

 

Thanks Mr.Fox! It works now! I forgot to press F12 and choose boot option. My USB stick with recovery have seen correctly.

 

I've got a new samsung evo ssd for my AW 17. I installed this in the secondary disk slot.
I had cloned my hdd to this drive with the samsng data migration software.
Now my windows boot drive (SSD ) is E:, not C and it's creating problems
I tried changing the (HDD Drive) i.e. C: with disk management to something else but it messed it up even further and my machine had issues. I've had to revert it back to C:

It seems to work normal when I boot with my HDD instead of the SSD.

I have the AlienRespawn bootable factory image in a USB but can I use this to modify the drive letters so that the SSD drive is C:\ and HDD is D or E?
Thanks

Edit:
Nevermind, I used acronis instead like someone had recommended to me earlier and it works brilliantly!

 

This youtube video offered me excellent help for my ssd setup. He uses an AW 17 with msata cache enabled too.
The difference is I used acronis from the windows OS and he boots it up from a USB stick.
There seems to be a step missing where he doesn't enable msata cache for the non OS based HDD after the SSD migration.
That was easy to setup from the Intel software - just a couple of clicks!

 

How do I select the M.2 mSATA SSD to put Windows 8.1 on instead of the 1TB 5400RPM HDD that came with the laptop?

When running the backup discs I made via AlienRespawn I don't get an option to select a drive to reinstall the OS on?

 

Bump

 

Just going by what I planned to do but. .. is Uninstall the 5400RPM set the m.2 as primary in bios run respawn from usb after all is setup reinstall the 5400 wipe/format.

I've never seen the AW17R2 BIOS yet so I'm assuming you'd have to set m.2 as first boot and the 5400 as a secondary/slave

I could be way wrong here too, Just my educated guess.

I plan on setting up 2 m.2s in raid 0 just to play with it, and that's how I plan to do the install. Completely removing the 5400 would remove any doubt on the drive letters in my mind.

 

Try taking out the HDD and leaving only the m.2. That should do the trick!

 

Awesome will do! Thanks!

 

I thought the m.2 ssd came set as the boot drive and the 2.5 HDD was just an empty storage drive..at least that's the way I understood it on the AW 17.

On a related note, how would I go about replacing that 2.5 HDD with an ssd? Just pull out the hdd and install the ssd? Or is there stuff installed on the HDD on the 17 that I'll need to clone over somehow the the new ssd?

 

The thing is that sometimes the O.S comes preinstalled in the HDD. Therefore, you will need to re-do the O.S when that happens. If not, it's just taking out the old one and putting the new one in.

 

I had to purchase the AlienRespawn upgrade in order for it to allow me to save an image to where I like, by default it always wants to backup to an external HDD which is very slow so I had to make the purchase but Macrium Reflect Pro is better and gives you more flexibility.

After purchasing the upgrade for AlienRespawn, it now makrs all my files with a checkmark as if they were backed up to the cloud and always gives me a notification in the taskbar that my index rating is slow as it wants me to do scheduled backups and other stuff which I don't need! I don't like how it forcefully wants to do things. All I wanted ws the ability to create a system image when I need it and that's it!

That's why I use Macrium Reflect Pro. When I need to restore an image, simply hitting the restore button on the main GUI would reboot my laptop into the Macrium Reflect environment and I'd be back to my image that I saved in about 5 mins!

 

So forgive me if this has been asked 100 times already. I have a Windows 7 system with Alien Respawn. I have created the USB after everything is set up. If I understand it correctly, that USB (using the free version) is just a copy of the recovery partition and not of the system at that time (I would need the paid version for that).

So I
1) Set up Windows 7 from a fresh factory restore. Made the USB recovery drive.
2) Had an issue with drivers and had to do a restore using the recovery partition
3) Is my USB from the first set up still valid? I assume yes if its just a copy of the recovery partition. For instance if I made one now, it would be the same.

Second question:
I am looking to move from a 1TB HDD to a 512GB or 1TB SSD. I do not have the original Alienware recovery DVDs, just the USB I made above. What are my options for the new drive? Will a Alien Respwan restore work for the SSD (will the size come in to play?), using the USB I made? If so, does that create the recovery partition or is the USB now my sole recovery option (with the orignal HDD, I have the partition or the USB as options)? What is the best way to move from a HDD to a smaller or same size SSD?

Thanks!

 

Hey, proud owner of a new Alienware 13 here. Soon after I bought my system I swapped the stock HDD with a Samsung Evo 840 SSD and did a fresh install. However I neglected to install AlienRespawn before filling up the SSD with my other applications, and now when I try and install AlienRespawn I run into 'not enough space' errors. I've tried moving my games and stuff onto an external hard drive and trying again, but with no luck.

Is it worth trying to get AlienRespawn re-installed, or is it fairly non-critical? Could use some advice here. I should mention that I (stupidly) didn't create a recovery drive when I first got this thing.

Thanks.