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Saturday, November 16, 2013

[Rant] Still could not get rid of the Dell Latitude 10 Tablet (part 3)

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The story so far

 
Let me sum up what’s happened so far.
 
The factory recovery functionality of my Dell tablet broken when I upgraded to Windows 8.1. The usual things like going back to Windows 8 or reinstalling the recovery software didn’t fix it. I want to sell the tablet. I don’t care for anything else. But to sell the tablet, I have to have recovery working.
 
I decided to do it on my own and I removed everything on the tablet and installed Windows 8 from a MSDN disk image using the OEM key. So far so good.
 
I had come across two ways to make it work. Note that I have not tried either way before in my life. So the chances of things going wrong was pretty high.
 

Custom Refresh Image

 
The first method was to make a custom Refresh image. That’s quite easy. First, setup the OS the way you want. Then use the following command to make an image.
 
 
 
Problems
  1. You can place the image on another partition. But not at the root of it. It’s fine but the issue is, you cannot hide the partition. You can remove the drive letter after registering the image. But that’s not exactly hiding. Once you Refresh the OS, a letter would be assigned to the drive automatically. That’s bad. But in my case, even that is fine. If whoever buys the tablet deletes the data in that partition and is unable to use recovery anymore, it is not my problem. But the people who assess the tablet might be concerned. So I cannot completely ignore it.
  2. You cannot use that image to Reset Windows!!! You can only used it for Refresh. But I found it the hard way. There aren’t much information on this.
So no, it was not going to work. I needed to look into the second method.
 

Setup Factory Restore the way OEMs do

 
 
Problems
 
It seemed that a part of the information was missing.
 
Basically, the winre.wim mentioned in part 6 was missing. And I couldn’t register an image placed in the root of the recovery partition as shown in part 8. Even if I moved it to into a directory, I couldn’t get it work. Reset basically didn’t work.
 

What’s next?

 
With both methods coming to a dead end, I didn’t know what to do anymore. I knew that there has to be a way because how else would Dell and all the other OEM partners do it? So I googled for a 3rd method – a method that works.

And the story continues….here

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