First let me say that I have been lurking in these forums for almost a year and gained some valuable information. I thank you all for that.
On to the recovery partiton,
I was able to obtain the recovery partition for vista home premimum.
I used acronis true image to make a image of it and restored it to the 3rd partition on my e1705 that came with MCE. If you didin't know, the vista recovery partition is ntfs. I had already installed vista ultimate to the 2nd partition. The recovery partition is invoked by hitting F8 and choosing the recovery option. Once I put the image on the 3rd partition, I did not have the recovery options. Just the standard vista menu. I got a bright idea of restoring the MBR from my MCE image I made with acronis and upon reboot and hitting F8, I now had that option.
So now I had the Dell recovery option but no image. Looking at the restore partition, the image is in a folder Dell\image and is called Factory.wim. Doing research on the web, I found out that that is a new Microsoft image made with imagex. I then found a copy of imagex. It is a command line program ran from the command prompt. But when I did that, it was finding a file called MSS.log that was in use and could not be accessed. So another idea hit me to hit F8 while booting and using the command prompt option from the recovery menu I was able to run imagex. It created the image great. It must be named Factory.wim. Then I booted back into vista and copied it over the home premimum image. Once that was done, I rebooted and went in to the recovery menu and restored the image. Took about 20 minutes and I received a successful message that the image had been restore. Booted back in vista ultimate and everything works as expected. I know it restored the image I made because the first thing it did was to format the c partition.
So there is a way that you can put your own image using vista. Just like XP.
If anyone cares, the command line text for imagex is: imagex /capture c: (path to store image)\Factory.wim.
Users with vista can just get a hold of imagex and create thier own images. But users of XP, will need to first get a copy of the vista restore partition.
Trust me, this wokrs. I have done it.
Any questions just ask and I will try to answer them.
On to the recovery partiton,
I was able to obtain the recovery partition for vista home premimum.
I used acronis true image to make a image of it and restored it to the 3rd partition on my e1705 that came with MCE. If you didin't know, the vista recovery partition is ntfs. I had already installed vista ultimate to the 2nd partition. The recovery partition is invoked by hitting F8 and choosing the recovery option. Once I put the image on the 3rd partition, I did not have the recovery options. Just the standard vista menu. I got a bright idea of restoring the MBR from my MCE image I made with acronis and upon reboot and hitting F8, I now had that option.
So now I had the Dell recovery option but no image. Looking at the restore partition, the image is in a folder Dell\image and is called Factory.wim. Doing research on the web, I found out that that is a new Microsoft image made with imagex. I then found a copy of imagex. It is a command line program ran from the command prompt. But when I did that, it was finding a file called MSS.log that was in use and could not be accessed. So another idea hit me to hit F8 while booting and using the command prompt option from the recovery menu I was able to run imagex. It created the image great. It must be named Factory.wim. Then I booted back into vista and copied it over the home premimum image. Once that was done, I rebooted and went in to the recovery menu and restored the image. Took about 20 minutes and I received a successful message that the image had been restore. Booted back in vista ultimate and everything works as expected. I know it restored the image I made because the first thing it did was to format the c partition.
So there is a way that you can put your own image using vista. Just like XP.
If anyone cares, the command line text for imagex is: imagex /capture c: (path to store image)\Factory.wim.
Users with vista can just get a hold of imagex and create thier own images. But users of XP, will need to first get a copy of the vista restore partition.
Trust me, this wokrs. I have done it.
Any questions just ask and I will try to answer them.
