Reimaging RF510

Hello,

I have an old Samsung RF510-S01US where the HDD failed on me. Prior to replacement with another drive (non-samsung) I utilized the Recovery Solutions Center 5 to do a complete image of the HDD onto an external HDD via USB. I had done this one before when I originally purchased the laptop as that HDD failed.

This time around, many years later, I needed to reacquire a disc from Samsung who did mail me out a new copy of the System Recovery Media (which has Win 7 home premium 64bit). I also found a copy of the Admin Tools in .iso and had that mounted onto a USB Drive. I can press F4 and enter into the Recovery Solution Center easily. I also can have the laptop load up via the USB drive after going into BIOS and making it the first media to boot up.

During the process with using the Admin tools, I can re-partition the 500MB into 4 parts; 1 - 100mb, 2- 25gb, 3 - 20 GB (recovery) and 4 - the remainder of the drive size. During this process it will set the MBR and eventually come to the point to install windows where I put the disc in for installation of files and it won't continue as an error will come up saying that it's not the same disc and there is a problem with a mismatch in files?

I continue forward and eventually can install windows 7, I can then use windows to create a single partition because this is what seems to be mirrored when I go into the Recovery Center and initiate the complete recovery progress. This is confirmed under the advanced tab that there are 2 sets of partitions and are copies of each other. I start the recovery process and I get another error saying that the size of the partition to be restored is too small. Increase the partition size first.

I know I'm missing something here but I can't quite place my finger on it. Samsung won't help.
If you have the time and patience, you're welcome to leave a detailed record on here and/or PM me with contact information. Thanks!

 

For starters you can check these posts in case you haven't

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...tion-on-samsung-notebooks.727171/#post9312497

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ries-owners-lounge.631237/page-73#post8907246

 

The above links kind of helped, but not a lot.

I Did manage to get it back to a factory reset, but for whatever reason I am not able to restore the image created as the drive was failing. What I did to fix this back to factory was put the old drive back in and wait the 14 hours to boot into recovery. I then did the 'ol control+delete+F10 trick using the secclx password which allowed me to make an admin tools USB drive to boot from. The Admin tools version that was made for me was 5.0.0.2, not the 5.0.2.5 that seems to be floating around in an .iso on the innerwebz.

Prior to replacing the drives, I notices that I had 3 partitions on the old drive - MBR for 100mb, Hidden Recovery for 18.5GB and the remainder as a C drive partition. Prior to completely shutting down and replacing the HDD, I copied the recovery partition onto a separate USB drive.

Once the new drive was placed into the laptop, I booted through the USB (ensuring that the boot manager in F2 was seeing the USB drive and listed as first), I recreated the partitions as a MBR, 20GB hidden recovery and the remainder as a single partition. I then copied the files from the saved partition using the command xcopy C:\ D:\ /h/i/c/k/e/r/y/.

I still couldn't install my most current image that I recently created but it is back into a factory reset effectively at this time and operational.

When I attempt to use the recovery manager through F4 - I do get an error stating that the partition is too small. I don't know why this is happening, I think I may have missed a step somewhere, but I'm also thinking that the drive was far too gone and the image is corrupt.

Might be helpful for others.... might not. If any one can tell me why this is happening, would be a good learning point. Additionally, I did see the error message that setup.exe was a version mismatch and wouldn't install through the admin tools unlike others that I've seen who could on youtube. Information on why this happened would be equally helpful for my learning.

 

Sorry I am late to the party here. And I'm afraid this will still just be a brief and generic answer.

Thanks a lot @Ripcord999 for posting those links. Since those posts were made, I finally decided to write a more complete summary last year on how to backup and re-create SRS, covering both SRS5 and SRS6. It is linked in the General section of the Sticky List on top of the Samsung forum.

@DrShikima: If (as it sounds like) you have BOTH an Admin Tool USB made with your own SRS AND a copy of the Recovery Partition contents (all files and folders, including hidden ones) you are in good shape.

The easiest way then is definitely to boot the Admin Tool USB and let it wipe the disk and create new partitions. If you create partitions yourself, it won't work. Once you have the newly created Recovery partition (containing SRS software, but no images) simply copy those files and folders back to it (using XCOPY as you described). This should let you boot SRS with F4 and restore the factory image.

If SRS still will not F4 boot after this, you can try installing Win7 on the big partition (it should add itself to the boot list on the small 100MB MSR partition) and install the SRS Windows app from SW Update. The first time you run the SRS Windows app it should verify and update the F4 link. You don't have to worry about drivers or activation, this is just a temporary Windows installation to help SRS get its bearings right. Once you are able to get into Recovery (F4) you can restore the factory image or any of your backed up images.

Note that SRS5 generally does NOT work if you install Win8.x -- I assume the same is true with Win10.

I'd say you should consider whether re-creating SRS5 is worth your time and effort: If you want the ability to restore the Win7 factory image and/or restore Win7 images that you previously backed up with SRS to external disks, then the answer is yes. If you think you will be moving on to Win10 anyways, I recommend you start over with SRS6 -- or skip SRS altogether. Member @Gulfmaster recently posted a guide for SRS6/Win10 which is also linked in the Samsung Forum Sticky List.

I hope this helps. I'll be able to take another look sometime tomorrow (Sunday).