How To Manually Restore a Dell Computer Running Vista
In my line of work I occasionally have to repair/restore various notebook computers. I recently had a Dell Inspiron E1505 dropped off at my desk which was having “Vista Issues”.
The machine wouldn’t shut down properly, and had various issues, even after applying updates, searching for spyware, etc. At some point someone had installed Vista Home Premium over the factory installed Vista Home Basic that came with the machine. I figured restoring it to factory defaults would probably be a step in the right direction, but I didn’t have the factory restore DVD (if indeed they even came with one). Luckily Dell has a restore partition that includes the factory image.
Normally, to access this restore partition and re-image the computer, you’d reboot the machine and press CTRL-F11 as it is booting into Windows. Unfortunately, when you install a new OS over the top of the Dell-tweaked one, you lose this functionality. So how do you restore the factory image if you don’t have the factory image installed anymore?
On the D: partition, there is an image file in D:\Dell\Image\ falled “factory.wim“. This is the factory image. In D:\tools\ is the necessary Microsoft imagex.exe utility needed to restore the image.
So basically boot up the system into a command line, either using a Vista disk, or even a Windows 98 Boot CD/disk.
Run the following command:
d:\tools\imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:
The “1″ argument represents the “image number” in the .wim file.
If it is working you’ll see the following
X:\>d:\tools\imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:
ImageX Tool for Windows
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-2005. All rights reserved.
Progress: 0%
It will take perhaps 5 minutes for the progress meter to start working–are you suprised? When was the last time Microsoft gave us a linear progress indicator? I’m just happy it didn’t go backwards. In all the process took around 20 minutes.
The full imagex syntax for imagex with the /apply flag is:
imagex /apply image_file image_number image_name image_path {/check | /ref | /scroll | /verify}
