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

If you've still got the stock HDD and didn't erase the recovery partition, you should still be able to physically create recovery media by swapping drives and launching respawn. As for creating a 'user' recovery image for your SSD, respawn will only allow an image of up to 32gb max, from recollection, and the size of your 'image' is bigger than this due to all the installed programs nd games. You could try uninstalling some programs/games from the SSD and try again - if it still fails, and if it is really important to you, simply reinstall everything again from scratch on the SSD and keep games down to a minimum as they soon bulk up the system image......

 

Thanks for the advice, I'll swap in the old drive and work from there. I'll see if I can't get all the personalisation stuff (wallpapers etc) off of the old drive, too.

 

So, how do you create the recovery media USB with the new AlienRespawn? All the options to create it are greyed out.

EDIT: Looks like my brand new AW17 that just arrived has a corrupted recovery partition.

 

Copy what Ramzay said here for my stock AW13 drive - I swapped it back in and I'm getting a message about the recovery drive being borked. Now I think about it I think this also happened when I first got the machine.

Here's a screenshot of my partitions in EaseUS Partition Master if it's of any help for diagnosing what the problem is.

 

Well, that is really messed up, Ben. I think I would diskpart clean that drive and start over from scratch. I would recommend using Macrium Reflect for disk imaging going forward. Respawn is not the best, and changes they have made to it in the past couple of years have made it an undesirable product. I would grab your OS product key if you don't already have it and get this done. Save your Alienware wallpaper to another drive if you like having it, but wipe out everything on disk and let Windows setup rebuilt the basic partitions from scratch.

 

No love for clonezilla? I mean I checked their site (Macrium Reflect), and their freeware seems decent, however being a full fledged product I've seen so many disk image companies be the greatest one day then die by the wayside so quickly.

Clonzilla, although dated, has been there for awhile and been consistent in terms of performance and reliability. So 2-3 years down the road if there is need to reimage a disk, less risk it's gone bye-bye.

Just curious why this one.

 

@ped - Nothing wrong with Clonezilla. I have been using Macrium Reflect for years and it is an outstanding product. It's worth every penny. I have upgraded versions several times and have paid license for all of my beast machines. In addition to excellent cloning and imagining, it creates mountable backup files and has a Windows boot menu feature that allows you to boot into a WinPE environment to fix boot problems and do image, backup and clone operations, migrate an OS to new hardware, etc. For those that need it, it has full UEFI and RAID support. Not everyone needs those advanced features, but I use them. For those that only want basic cloning and imaging features, there are several good freeware options.

I used to be an Acronis fan, but I have had several bad experiences with its imaging failing and not being able to use the images it created. No more Acronis for me.

 

Thanks for the advice, Mr. Fox, I'll think about wiping and re-installing, and I'll definitely take a look at Macrium.

 

Ok, so I stupidly used AlienRespawn to install my new M.2 SSD without reading this thread. Doh!

Followed L_porass' advice about unplugging the main HDD and letting AlienRespawn install to the SSD. Then boot on the SSD and format the HDD from within windows.

Got a few issues:
1) System is still quite slow to boot- about 26 seconds from power button to login screen being on

2) WEI is indicating a score of 5.9 for the hard drive.

3) I've lost the alien head logo whilst windows is booting (just a generic blue windows logo). Obviously this is the most serious issue...

Googling gives some vague results- possibly pointing towards that it's a fact with having a 1TB HDD attached or something to do with SATA modes? I have to admit I'd naively assumed this would be a rather simple process. By using Alienrespawn in this manner is there something I've likely to have overlooked or is this an inherent issue as I'm not running a clean install?

Intel RST shows it on a 6Gb/s connection. Crystal disk mark shows:
Seq Q32T1: 559.8MB/s read, 506.6MB/s write
4K Q32T1: 359.1MB/s read, 290.0MB/s write
Seq: 249.2MB/s read, 444.7MB/s write
4K: 27.52MB/s read, 95.72MB/s write

Next step is to check those against bookmarks (Crucial MX200). Edit: They seem to check out OK.

 

Looks partially fixed- last couple of boots have been sub 10 seconds. I noticed SATA mode was set to ACHI rather than Intel Smart Response

Difficult, of course, to say whether that's made the difference or just post install issues being cleaned up...

 

I have been having a big headache installing Windows 7 on my Origin PC in UEFI mode.

The problem is, after Windows finish the first phase of copying/installing the files and just about to reboot, it would give me a message saying unable to create boot partition bla bla bla......

Problem:

I was going to diskpart, then CLEAN command, then CONVERT GPT command

What was happening is, when you refresh the disks and create a new partition through the Windows installer, it creates an extra EFI AND MSR partition. Remember we did the CONVERT GPT command in Diskpart? that also added one MSR partition so now the partition order is messed up as it looks like this...

MSR
EFI
MSR
EFI
C:

Solution:

Once I ran the DISKPART this time, all I did was select disk, then CLEAN and that's it, didn't convert it to GPT

Since I have booted the Windows 7 disc in UEFI mode rather than the regular mode, the Windows Setup wizard will do the GPT initialization on the disk and thus now we have a proper order for the other smaller partitions which looks like this:

MSR
EFI
C:

 

Windows 7 does not run in pure UEFI mode, hence one major contributor to the drama and heartache around 980M upgrades on the M18x family. If you want to run Windows 7 in a UEFI environment, you must enable CSM/Legacy Option ROM in the BIOS. Some of the crappy OEMs provide no option in the BIOS to do this and the poor unfortunate sucker that bought such crippled system are stuck with Windows 8 and newer. To install Windows 7 in UEFI mode with CSM/Legacy support enable you do have to boot in the optical disc or USB installer in UEFI mode as you discovered. If you install Windows 7 in UEFI mode without CSM/Legacy Option ROM it will install, but the screen will go black and the system freeze during Windows logon.

 

Trying to boot the Intel 750? Set the motherboard to UEFI with CSM support, fast boot off and secure off. Ill haver to look when I get home about the NVME settings in bios. Altoguh I pulled the 750 out because it was not faster than my raid 0 ssd's in real world performance just synthetics I still have my settings written down at home. It is tricky to get the bios right for NVME boot and windows 7.

 

I figured it out it was me creating the installation media (USB Flash Disk) in UEFI mode in Rufus so that was causing it to have an extra MBR partition on the USB Disk which messed up everything. I ended up creating the USB Fisk as MBR for UEFI BIOS and it worked.

It seems like you missed my thread about the crappy Intel 750 HDD (yes HDD this doesn't perform like an SSD to me)

Intel 750 PCIe SSD = Worst SSD in the world!

 

I figured it out it was me creating the installation media (USB Flash Disk) in UEFI mode in Rufus so that was causing it to have an extra MBR partition on the USB Disk which messed up everything. I ended up creating the USB Fisk as MBR for UEFI BIOS and it worked.

It seems like you missed my thread about the crappy Intel 750 HDD (yes HDD this doesn't perform like an SSD to me)

Intel 750 PCIe SSD = Worst SSD in the world!

 

I did miss it, sorry. Yes I was very unimpressed with the 750 so much so I sent it back and I hardly ever do that.

 

Seems Intel is getting to pretty good at finding more ways to unimpress us than they ever have before, LOL.

 

Hi there,

I am waiting for my new AW17 R3 to be delivered , and while waiting i stumbled upon this gr8 thread.
Without it I wouldnt have thought about creating a Factory Backup Image, but since i am new to this i have a couple of questions! , i hope they wont be too bothersome.

I have read through the thread and apparently "Macrium Reflect" seems to be more popular than "Acronis" so based on that i am planning on using MR then.
So for the question....

1. Is there a difference between the "Recovery Media" mentioned by the OP and a "Disk Image" ?
2. Is a "Disk Image" all i need to do when i get my AW17 or is there anything else you would advise me to do before i continue to use my AW?
3. If i understand correctly, i can create a Disk Image which will be similar to an ISO file and i can store that in an external HDD, do i still need a USB?
4. I am planning on replacing the 1TB HDD with a 500GB SSD Samsung 840 EVO (which i already own) and then adding a M.2 Samsung 500GB 850 EVO. Will this result in any problems when using the "Disk Image" to restore the system on the M.2 drive?
5. If you could link to any guide or tutorial that could help me with this process it would be great (as i said i am a newb at this )

Any other advice u have is greatly appreciated.
sorry for the long read :S

 

I just did mine using Acronis 2016. You will need a USB for a emergency recovery drive, in case you cannot boot into a windows environment to restore the image.

Acronis is super easy to use. When you get your laptop, do not install anything on it except Acronis. Then, image your PC drive (SSD) that has your OS. You can image your other drive as well if you wish, no need really. Then create a USB drive using the software, it is very simple.