Finally solved it. It seems that you can't use the support os recovery via the bios with or without the usb recovery drive that you CREATED with windows 10.  what I had to do was in following order...1.  create a NEW recovery drive within windows 11, and boot up with that USB recovery drive (using F12)2.  perform a recovery which will install windows 11 - I guess that simply doing the upgrade from window 10 to 11 isn't updating some recovery partition on the ssd (please to note, that alienware software IS included in the new usb recovery drive, but doesn't work well as I can't change the keyboard colours, but weirdly worked if it was an upgrade from win10 to win11)3.  finally, restart pc with F12 on the bios screen, then select support OS recovery - this time, no single blue pixel with critical error and was able to perform full recovery.... of windows 10! phew.
Hi, I have an Alienware m15 R2 which I recently upgraded to Windows 11. I then decided I wanted to go back to Windows 10. Unfortunately, restoring back to Windows 10 via Windows Restore screen tells me that I missed the boat and can't restore. So I then proceeded to use the Alienware OS Recovery (via BIOS) which gives me a black screen with a single blue pixel on the top left corner, and has a white mouse pointer which I can move. After a moment, a dialog appears saying "critical condition, attempting to restart" (or something like that that as its quickly disappeared) and repeated the process (not rebooting pc, but dialog appears again after about 3 minutes). So, I went back to Windows 11, downloaded "Alienware OS Recovery tool", created a recovery USB, and rebooted laptop, press F12, and selected my USB to boot up. Then after a brief moment, black screen, single blue pixel again! Any idea how I can restore my laptop back to factory resetting? Thanks
m15 R2, installed Windows 11, restoring back to factory