INFO: How to make discrete images of your recovery partitions.

I have just made a set of WIM images of my recovery partitions on my 3820TG.

Disclaimers:

I don't guarantee that anything I write below will work. Additionally I am only going to give you directions that contain the major steps. It is up to you to read the documentation and figure out how to use the tools I recommend. There are many other ways to do what I have dome with the tools and steps mentioned. Some may be better, some may be worse. This worked for me - it might not for you. It's not a cookbook.

DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT MAKING A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING FIRST!

If you pooch your HDD and come here complaining that your computer doesn't work and you don't have any way to restore it, you probably won;t get much sympathy.

I am writing this all down from memory. There may be some small steps that need adjustment. Just think about what you are doing before you commit to anything and yiou should be fine.

Here's the method....

Materials/software needed:

- WinPE bootable USB stick or CD/DVD - Using a USB stick is preferable as it allows you to add tools to your winPE environment as you need them.
- Windows Advance Installation Toolkit version 3 / Windows 7 - You will need to install this on a Win7 PC that you have admin priviledges on. This is the toolset you will use to create your bootable WinPE USB stick. It also contains tools that allow you to manipulate the contents of your resulting image files (!)
- A target external HDD to write the images tu during their creation.
- gimagex.exe - a graphical front end to imagex.exe, the imaging tool included with WinPE
- diskpartitioner.exe - A graphical front end for diskpart.exe, the disk partitioning utility included with WinPE.
- Windows recovery boot disk
- a fresh backup of your enture HDD, just in case.

OPTIONAL
- Other tools to add to your WinPE drive - This USB stick can end up being a powerful resource for backups, imaging, partition manipulation, defragmentaton, data recovery, etc. I am using several tools available in standalone form from Piriform, ccleaner, defraggler, recuva and speccy. I am also using pstart.exe and q-dir.exe (see links section below)
- An Ubuntu LiveCD (the alternate iso is preferable) only because I like gparted better than partitionmanager.exe

Method to create the image.
1. Follow the directions located at 4sysops.com to create your bootable WinPE USB stick - Create bootable Windows PE 3.0 USB drive - 4sysops Give your USB stick a volume name you wil recognize in step 4, below.
2. Install additional tools as needed. At a minimum, install Partition Manager and Gimagex.
3. Boot your system into the USB drive by plugging the USB stick in, turning on the system, getting into the bios and selecting the USB stick as the boot device.
4. Once wipeinit finishes and you are presented with a command prompt, you will need to find the mount point (drive letter) of the root of your USB stick. If you have a SD card in your system the root of the USB stick will probably be at G:\ but it may just as easily be f:\ or h:\ or any other leter. This is because WinPE will mount all mountable volumes on the system including externally attached drives. It will also mount a ram disk at x:\
5. Assuming you have gimgex installed, type gimagex at the command prompt.
6. Use gimagex to capture an image of he SystemReserved and PQSERVICE volumes. You might as well take an image of your acer volume while you're at it.

Using and/or manipulating the images.
- The *.WIM files created during your imaging session can be mounted to a directory on the Windows7 machine you have installed WAIK on, from the command line. You can also use the Windows System Image Manager included with the WAIK.
- Once you have the image mounted you can manipulate it however you like. Be aware that it is entirely possible to completely pooch the image file rendering it useless, so always work on a copy. Once you gt in there and start looking you will find that there is a wim file inside the pqservice image. That's right - A base image of the system. I have yetb to try it but it is my beleif that you can replace this WIM file with a new WIM file of your own creation from, say, a clean install.
- As far as I know, the partition structure, partition types, boot flags and sizes have to be exactly the same as the original patition structures and sizes in order for your <alt> <f10> recovery to work. Examine the existing structure and make sure you get it right, including the 1mb of unused space at the beginning of the drive space. This is where I prefer gparted in the Linux environment. It *might* be possible to make a larger PQService directory, but I have a feeling that it may interfere with the correct placement of the Systemreserved directory. If that isn;t where it is supposed to be then I have a feeling that the alt-f10 won't be able to find the recovery boot partition.
-If you manipulate the partitions or recreate them on a new, larger drive, you may have to use a recovery CD to fix them. t may also be nescessary to boot into windows after you have run a repair from the windows recovery CD, and run the acer erecovery tool to restore the system to factory defaults. If you are working with a replacement (custom) WIM this step will resore your customized factory image to the machine.
- If you wish to write an image back to a disk, you should reformat the target volume first.

Links:
4sysops instructions for building a winpe USB stick
Create bootable Windows PE 3.0 USB drive - 4sysops

WAIK download and documentation
Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7

Gimagex download
ImageX GUI (GImageX)

diskpartitioner.exe download
http://www.paraglidernc.com/files/DiskPartitioner.exe

Ubuntu live CD alternate ISO
Alternative downloads | Ubuntu

Enjoy!

 

great ideia.

just for info, PQService partition contains, for notebooks with windows 7, a folder called D2D where is the factory OS. The wim image in that folder is splitted in swm files. If you can enter your PQ Service find D2D folder and copy it to another disk. Join the swm files and you will have a wim with your factory OS. You can even replace it by your customized image by editing some files.

 

There always more involved for proper restoration ..

I will suggest to all , to get an extra HDD do the tests to it , before you format the real thing , and lost for good any ability to restore the laptop with the default OS .

 

Agreed completely. I bought a Momentus XT 500GB and put the originaln WD Scorpio Blue in an antistatic bag as soon as I got it imaged.