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How to restore to access respawn partition?

post #1 of 6
1/27/08 at 4:39am
Thread Starter 
I installed vista over an existing installation and it overwrote the MBR. I see my respawn partition but how do I access it to restore my PC to factory settings? I have a backup of the MBR as bootsect.bak on the root of the C drive.
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post #2 of 6
1/27/08 at 5:03am
Did you get discs with the system?
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post #3 of 6
1/27/08 at 2:59pm
Thread Starter 
I have the Recovery DVD (basically just a Vista install CD) and a support CD (some basic drivers). I can see the respawn partition on the hard drive if I go to Disk Management, but I can't access it. There has to be a program they run to "Install" the shortcuts for Alien Respawn v2.0. The support guy I talked to was worthless.

The reason I want to respawn is I cannot locate the Command Center software, the Camera drivers, etc for M15x.
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post #4 of 6
1/28/08 at 7:19pm
My *gut* tells me this doesn't sound right. I would assume if you bought Respawn you would get physical CDs/DVDs to restore from vs a partition because what if the hard drive fails (physical failure)? You order a new drive and can't restore from the broken one...

I think you didn't order it or didn't get it. Mine (although mine didn't work) came in a DVD case labled as such. It contains a bootable CD and a DVD for the Ghost images. Yours might be a bit different with Vista (mine XP Pro and Respawn 1.0), but the concept is the same.
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post #5 of 6
1/28/08 at 10:46pm
Thread Starter 
Yeah with the new m15x it is not an option *yet*.

Yay! I was able to figure out a fix on my own. Luckily I didn't have to rely on AW tech support or I would have been left to drown.

So what happened was the MBR was overwritten with a new Vista installation, thus the BIOS shortcut to Alien Respawn v2.0 was not coming up and the link in Windows was gone.

I had to locate the Intel SATA hard drive drivers on their website and put them on a floppy. I had a USB floppy drive, they are such a relic these days.

I then booted off a Norton Ghost 10 CD, pressed F6 to load the SATA drivers. My thinking was maybe they used Ghost to do the image.

Once in Ghost I was disappointed but poked around the extra tools they included. One allowed me to change which partition was the active partition. I selected the 8gig respawn partition and rebooted into Alien Respawn v2.0. It just finished a successful recovery of the Windows partition back to factory conditions. I did have to boot off the Ghost 10 CD after the respawn and set the active partition back to the correct one. Everything is working properly and back to factory shipped condition!

Please keep this thread to help out other users who will most certainly run into this issue at some point with the new m15x hard drive only respawn.

To AW's credit, this was a more difficult issue to figure out, but their front line of tech support acted like it was completely impossible and out of the question and I would have to live with not being able to access the respawn partition. No offense, but the Dell support guys in India are harder to understand but better at customer service. I think the AW techs are South American (based on the names) or Eastern European (based on the accents), but I didn't ask.

buzzin
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post #6 of 6
10/2/10 at 5:29am
Can you help me? I didn't really understand your explanation so can you please try to explain more basicly to me? I got my Alienware m15x. When I opened it, it was an alien backgrond and everything was in I guess it's called "Alien Respawn" but then I installed a Disc that I got along with the m15x which is called "Alien Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit" when I installed that there were no Alien background no more so I thought that the Alien Respawn was gone and the normal Windows 7 was currently in use. Someone help with to get my Alien Respawn back please?
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