Packard Bell Recovery, Cannot open WIM file error.

[DannyHerian]

HI Folks need your help on this one,

I have a Packard Bell Easynote SW51-B-012 Laptop in for repair and am having problems with Packard Bells complete recovery.

The laptop originaly came to me with a faulty DC Socket and a blue screen of death at boot up. After fixing the DC socket it was time to turn my attention to the blue screen that was apearing after the windows Vista logo screen. The blue screen would only appear for a fraction of a second before rebooting the system, making it impossible to see the error number.

Windows Recovery cold not resolve the problem so I decided to run a complete recovery (as the client had a back up their documents) by using the the Packard Bell recovery partition.

The recovery starts and says "Please wait. HHD Preparation in progress:" status bar then goes to 100% but then a series of pop up error messages appear one after another when clicking on the 'ok' for each one, error's in order as below:

1. Cannot open WIM file
2. WIMGetAttributes failed
3. There is no undex %d in the WIM file
4. cannot set temp path to work in
5. Cannot load imagex %d from src WIM file
6. Applying image failed
7. Cannot apply/cleanup image

After clicking 'ok' for the last error the "Please Wait. Recovery in Progress:" status bar goes to 100% with 'Finished' below. The next screen says "Recovery Complete" and then reboots with the obviouse BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

I have checked that all partitions can be seen by other systems and that the partition type's are set corrtectly. Also have run the Seegate DOS drive diagnostics on the drive, that did find errors and fixed but the recovery is still producing the same errors.

Command prompt from the windows recovery enables me to look around the recovery partition and from there I can see that wim directory still contains 6 files titled recovery.swm to recovery6.swm and I the recovery1.ini file contains the following configuration

[Configuration]
MCDTAG=FALSE
logfile="Recovery.log"
DATAEXIST=FALSE
Source=\wim\
Destination=C:\
nameWin=\wim\recovery.wim
namesplit=\wim\recovery.swm
factory=FALSE
split=TRUE
sizesplit=500
TOOLSDIR=\tools\
TAGSDIR=\config\
LABELHDD=HDD
LABELBP=_OEMBP


Is there a fix for this or is it a problem with the hardrive?

Dont have a recovery DVD as the customer dosnt have one.

[danlefree]

I do not work with data recovery, though if you're just looking to get the data off the failed hardware I'd recommend that you salvage whatever you can with an Ubuntu LiveCD (which should come with sufficient disk, video, and network drivers to allow you to move files from the laptop) and investigate your options for reviewing error logs and diagnostics from there.

[deepsand]

Have you run CHKDSK?

[DannyHerian]

Yes I did and it found a small number of error's and fixed them.

Its as if its a problem with Packard's copy of the rescue file's.

[DannyHerian]

I do not work with data recovery, though if you're just looking to get the data off the failed hardware I'd recommend that you salvage whatever you can with an (which should come with sufficient disk, video, and network drivers to allow you to move files from the laptop) and investigate your options for reviewing error logs and diagnostics from there.

Data is ok as the customer has a backup of their files.

Note that when you start a factory reset useing the recovery partition one of the first processes to happen is all of the data on the c drive is deleted.

[DannyHerian]

Have you run CHKDSK?

Yes I did and it found a small number of error's and fixed them.

Its as if its a problem with Packard's copy of the rescue file's.

[deepsand]

Dont have a recovery DVD as the customer dosnt have one.

Was this an option that was here declined?

Yes I did and it found a small number of error's and fixed them.

This was on the rescue partition?

Its as if its a problem with Packard's copy of the rescue file's.

That very well may be. How is the rescue partition formatted?

[DannyHerian]

Was this an option that was here declined?


This was on the rescue partition?


That very well may be. How is the rescue partition formatted?

Rescue partition is still all intact and no the DVD was not an option as a DVD was not given when the laptop was purchased.

[deepsand]

Rescue partition is still all intact ...

But, what format?

And, is this a normal System Recovery Console partition; or, a PB proprietary one?

... and no the DVD was not an option as a DVD was not given when the laptop was purchased.

The question was whether or not such was offered to the customer, with the customer declining such. If this is the case, perhaps it is still possible to acquire copy of such.