STUMPED. Booting into recovery partition..help

Climbing the walls trying to figure this out, and im not a computer expert and googling for the past 5 hours isn't helping.


Its very simple and i'm sure it can be done, so someone may be able to give me a hand.

I have a C drive and D drive on my Alienware m11x. The D drive is the recovery partition which I did not touch, and I can see from storage manager, but is hidden in "My Computer". I want to restore to factory settings using the recovery partition but I cannot because when I installed windows 7 professional clean, it somehow wiped something out.

Alienware has a software called AlienRespawn which is a recovery and backup software. I got it, installed it and ran it. And when you click "recover to factory settings" it restarts the computer and boots into the clean install windows system restore menu, which is NOT what i want. It's as if my computer can't see or connect to the hidden partition.


I dont have a cd drive, and i never got recovery disks from alienware so is there ANY WAY POSSIBLE, to somehow force my computer to boot from the D drive or find it or whatever. I installed EasyBCD bootloader and have no idea what to do.


ANY assistance appreciated. I need it back to factory settings!

 

Your BIOS should let you change the boot drive. On my Dell, F12 gives a boot menu, and F2 enters BIOS setup (where you can change the boot drive.) I don't know that Alienware uses the same keys, but it may. You have to press it at just the right time when it shows the Dell or Alienware splash screen. If you go into BIOS setup you should be able to change the drive boot order.

After the splash screen, when Windows is starting to boot (if it's booting Windows), press F8 to see Windows' boot menu where you may be able to access a recovery partition if it can find it.

As far as EasyBCD goes, it's been a while since I used it but you should be able to find instructions on the internet to help you create the boot menu and save it to the right place on the right hard drive.

 

To restore data:
1. Turn off your computer.
2. Disconnect all the devices connected to the computer (such as USB drive, printer, etc.)
and remove any recently added internal hardware.
NOTE: Do not disconnect the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the power cable.
3. Turn on your computer.
4. When the Alienware logo appears, press <F8> several times to access the Advanced
Boot Options window.
NOTE: If you wait too long and the operating system logo appears, continue to wait
until you see the Microsoft®
Windows®
desktop; then, shut down your computer and try
again.
5. Select Repair Your Computer.
6. Select Dell Factory Image Recovery and DataSafe Options and follow the instructions
on the screen.