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factory.wim file in Recovery drive

Anonymous
2009-05-12T15:59:40+00:00

There is a 4GB file on my Recovery drive named factory.wim, which I am unable to open.  I'm also getting error messages stating that my Recovery drive is nearly full.  What is this file, does it belong there, and if not, where should I put it?  Also, could a nearly full Recovery drive cause my computer to slow down?  I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Windows Vista Home Premium, only 4 months old.  Thanks for any information anyone can provide.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2009-05-12T21:01:31+00:00

    Your D: Drive is the Recovery Partition, that the Manufacturer put there, for your computer to put it back to factory settings in case of System Crash.

    It is not for you to save anything to; and it is not to compress and/or Index, or have System Restore turned on for it.

    Whatever you have installed or saved to D:, DELETE it very carefully and leave it alone.

    You are supposed to have made Recovery disks from D:, in case of Hard Drive failure.

    Ask the Manufacturer how to make them

    Mick Murphy - Microsoft Partner

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  1. Anonymous
    2009-05-14T21:39:47+00:00

    Jillcee,

    Just to add to Michael's excellent advice about keeping your D: partition as it came from the factory - it is there for recovery in case your system ever crashes and needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch.  To answer your question, the file named Factory.wim is the main recovery file that came on your computer and contains the information necessary to rebuild your PC if necessary.  Do not delete it under any circumstances.  You can delete any files that you have saved to the D: partition as they should not be there.  You should back up your data to an external hard drive, a physically separate second internal hard drive, CD, DVD, or flash drive. 

    Let us know if we can be of further assistance.

    Thanks,

    Gloria

    Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

    Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-01-14T01:39:33+00:00

    Hujorgen,

    I have found after many failed attempts at trying to recover a dying harddrive it is easier to order the dell restore disks from Dell or if they are not selling them someone is always selling a copy of them on Ebay.  I have had more luck when cloning the harddirve with the EASEUS Partition Master when using a Western Digital harddrive you can use their Acronis program.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-01-03T01:16:58+00:00

    Thanks for the info above. I have been successful in applying the image on a Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop but when I reboot the partition is not bootable.

    I wanted to preserve the Dell 3 partition build with the Utility, Main and Recovery partitions as this is a customer's computer. I then formatted the drive with 1 NTFS partition using Easeus Partition

    manager while booted into the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win). I applied the factory.wim file with imagex and no boot - "Operating system not found."

    I then booted with the Vista CD (Dell) and performed a Repair. It churned away for a while ~4 or 5 minutes and indicated it had repaired the system but still no boot from the hard drive.

    Do you have any suggestions on how to get the image applied and have it boot as normal?

    I run a small computer repair company and being able to apply the *.wim image will save me time and money when having to work on a system that has a catastrophic failure of the hard drive and the Dell

    factory recovery is unavailable.

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-07-26T10:19:02+00:00

    thanks thats a big help

    remlap 27

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