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}

So Microsoft is having their Windows Server / SQL Server / Visual Studio 2008 Launch Tour starting the end of this month and running into the springtime.

If you thought that 2005’s “Ready, Set, Launch!” was dumb name, they’ve come up with a really, really lame name for it this time: “Heroes Happen Here”.

They are having a Seattle one on April 1st at the Convention Center.

Nik, Matt, Grant and I went when they did the 2005 stuff, it was worth attending (would be more worth attending now that I’m using those products on a day-to-day basis). There were several tracks–database, development, and administrators (I think)–for seminars, which were fairly well done. We got a bunch of free products/licenses (SQL Server 2005, etc.), as well as some door prizes.

Anyway, I was planning on going, would like to learn about the new stuff. This year they have four tracks: IT Pro, Data Platform, Partner/Reseller and Developer. Developer track is currently full in Seattle, but has a waiting list.

On a side note, check out this hilarious post on what it would be like if Microsoft were a Schoolboy and software were homework.