Boot from Win7 (or whatever) CD/DVD to restore laptop from RECOVERY .WIM image

[Guest theodorosc]

Good morning to all !

 

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with a RECOVERY partition that has several .WIM images.

After trying to resize the OS partition that had win7 (so now the DELL MBR is gone, so I can't CTRL+F11 to access the recovery procedure) ,I formated the HDD (not the RECOVERY partition). And now I want to restore to factory settings

I found information on the net that I can restore my laptop to factory settings if I *somehow* manage to boot from a CD/DVD that has the imagex.exe tool and give from the command prompt (of the let's say win7 DVD) something like:

imagex /apply path_to_wim_images/FACTORY.WIM 1 C:\

(path is in the RECOVERY partition, and C the now empty second partition that had win7)

 

I have manually putted the imagex and several other relevant files to the RECOVERY partition (that I got from WAIK installation from another PC), and when I give the above syntax i get an error that "The subsystem needed to support the image type is not present"

 

So... is there ANY way to boot from a CD/DVD and using the imagex (or other) tool, and be able to restore my Dell from that .WIM image ?? Am I doing something wrong ?

(I don't have any Dell Recovery Discs, only the Dell drivers CD)

 

Thank you very much !!

 

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