Problem with AlienRespawn on m17x

Hi everyone.

I recently got the m17x with a 64bit Vista. Yesterday I decided to update the drivers, which pretty much killed my system (hell if I understand why updating drivers is so problematic, makes me feel just the same as I felt 7 years ago when I switched to Linux, which I am about to install on a second HDD just as soon as the caddy arrives, but I'm blabbering).

Anyway, I pressed F10 on boot for AlienRespawn. It loaded OK, with that weird Alienware background, but the white window with the AlienRespawn wizard is blank, all I see is the Back, Next and Cancel buttons. When I press Next I see some radio buttons, I chose the third one, hoping it would restore the system to the state it was when it was shipped, and after pressing Next again I saw a progress bar and eventually it did work, but this is pretty bad. What if I want to restore to one of the restore points I made? How am I supposed to find them?

At first I thought the problem may have something to do with the fact that when I first booted the system and Vista asked me for my location and language I chose Hebrew (as I am in Israel), which was a long shot since there's not supposed to be any connection between them, but made some sense since from what I could see on AlienRespawn the screens were directed right to left (the radio buttons/checkboxes were on the right, and the button order was reverse: cancel, next, back - if you're reading the buttons from left to right). After completing the restore I chose English and started AlienRespawn again just to check how it looks now, and it was still blank.

Anyone knows what the problem might be?

Thanks a lot.

[EDIT] P.S. It might be worth noting that while updating the drivers from the Dell website (and thus prior to doing the restore) I also updated the BIOS using the update on Dell's website.

 

Not sure, but respawn has been buggy for me.

I just killed the whole disk and installed myself

 

i just installed fresh copy of windows and use the drivers disk. i was never a big fan of respawn or reboot to factory.

 

I have had great success with respawn. I am not sure why you did not get any of the other options, but when I load it, I always had three options:
1. go to restore point
2. factory install w/ data backup
3. complete factory install.

I've always seleceted #2, and in all cases I had a basic functional machine in 30 minutes or less.

 

So, there's no one here who also gets a blank screen in AlienRespawn?

And secondly, from what I understand, I can do the same thing AlienRespawn's third option does by using the Vista and Alienware Resources discs?

I still think AlienRespawn is a nice feature, but without actually seeing what I'm doing it's almost impossible to use...

 

If it isn't working than you don't have any other option.

Just pop the Vista disc in and re-install.

The resource DVD has all the drivers and apps.

 

I had the same as you, and the only way for me was to install fresh vista, after it, I lost F10 alien respawn option on booting screen

 

The same problem with me. I don't like the respawn thing. It somehow doesn't fix problems as good as a fresh install. Allthough I didn't actually killed respawn jet... I probably will.

 

If you decide to format with a vista disc can you still get alienrespawn back?

Alex

 

i don't think so. you'll have to respawn with option 3.

 

If you have the alienrespawn DVD you can get it back. It worked for me, and even saved me some 80GB that disappeared after using the HDD alienrespawn.

 

Nice, thanks for the tip!

Alex

 

Damn. I must be the only one here who's had great success with the respawn partition. It worked like a champ all three times I used it....