No Alien-Respawn option?

I was just looking through the alienware website and was suprised to see no option to get alien-respawn, is the option not available anymore???

 

It is not specifically available as a separate cd that you can buy. They put a recovery partition on the hard drive and include the Dell Datasafe program to back it up to a cd or flash drive.

 

Are you talking about having respawn on a new/outlet computer, or are you talking about downloading the respawn from the support site to a computer you already have?

 

The AW Re-Spawn disk is mentioned in the 'new owners' AW manual, but does not seem to have existed from more than two months, that I know of.
It could have been removed from the market long before that. Now the Dell support site (support.dell.com) keeps all the drivers and apps updated.

 

Yep - Dell DataSafe Local... much faster than the AW Respawn 2.0 IMO.

As a reminder, if you have DataSafe Local, be sure to invest in a USB Flash Drive and create the recovery flash drive prior to reformatting the system... if you are going to go that route.

 

BatBoy, how big is that partition and how big should the flash drive be?

 

I believe its only 5-7GB - basically you need an 8GB Flash drive.

 

Thanks for the info Batboy +1

I basically just bought a 16GB just in case...

 

OfficeMax typically has sales every other week on flash drives. I was able to score 2 16GB Verbatim drives from them a couple weeks back... 20 some odd bucks a piece if memory serves...

 

Ops, I just bought the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 16GB for $43... (I should have asked about that too...)

 

Is there a reason you prefer a thumbdrive as the restore disk verses burning a DVD?

 

No - not really. Just like having the flash drive.

 

I was going to buy a new M17x, just wondering because when I bought my earlier one there was alien-respawn.

 

Yeah - I believe all new systems ship with DataSafe Local. The 11x has it and I seem to recall 17xR2 owners posting about it as well.

 

Actually it is faster than the DVD so it will take less time to restore the system.

 

Hopefully I won't have to restore the system that often so the time won't be all that bad, right?

Dual Layer DVD would actually be a bit cheaper than buying an 8GB flash drive only for back-up.

 

Whatever option works best for you

DVD media is always an alternative to a USB Flash drive.

 

Yeah. xD

If I restore from that disk will it have the Datasafe as part of the computer again? Kinda curious about that too.

 

Yes - as long as you use DataSafe Local to create the rescue media (be it DVD or Flash Drive), it will restore your system to when you first opened the box and depressed the power button.

 

Datasafe will be there. I messed up my M11X and used my flash drive to restore and it is exactly the way I received it. All my partitions are back.

 

Is there something to look out for specifically to store on the FLASH drive?
Getting my laptop soon and first thing I'm doing is install a SSD so do I'd need to save all data from the HDD?
Never saved anything that way on a flash drive and always used the DVD's to do a system restore but this seems much easier.
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

 

DataSafe is all menu driven for Flash Drive or DVD. Very easy to use, creating recovery media on my M17x took about 4.3GB so you need a drive larger than 4GB. Here are some caps of the menus:

 

Thanks!
That answers everything.