Help with Alienware Respawn! Getting frustrated :-(

I purchased a 250 GB SSD to upgrade my Alpha. I have tried using an 8GB usb as well as an old external (but formatted to make it clean) hard drive to make the recovery disc in Respawn. It looks like it does this successfully (I get a creation successful prompt after it is done). I close out the program, turn the Alpha off, put in my new hard drive, plug in the usb (or external drive), boot up the system. It immediately pops up with an Alienware logo and loads files. It seems that this is the Respawn program. It tells me it was unable to repair and needs to do a recovery. I get to the screen that is supposed to allow me to select the image (or drive?) in a large white box that says name/location, etc.

This is where my problem is. Nothing is listed in that white box. My usb or hard drive don't show up...and therefore, I can't put the OS, etc on my new hard drive. I would greatly appreciate any help with this! I've been looking online and most people seem to say this process is so simple. But I haven't seen the same problem that I'm running into. Any idea on how to fix this???? Not sure if I'd be better off just cloning the hard drive from here. I have a cable to do so, but was having a hard time finding a video on this (how to shrink the partition, etc).

Thoughts?

Did you follow a youtube walkthrough of it? Because if memory serves the set up has you picking a out of the way option for a reinstallation that is not in the recovery/restore options.. Also if all else fails you can always just get Windows 10 put on the USB and fresh install.. I believe the alpha motherboard uses a laptop tech meaning the cdkey is imprinted on the bios so it should work from the get go..

I did, but having trouble finding the exact version of Respawn that I have (it was recently updated for Windows 10.

Any idea on how to do the fresh install? I'm nervous about doing this without a video or fairly detailed instructions, as I'd be screwed if I messed this up (I assume). Thanks for responding!

@agrippi: Try asking here, they have many experts and Alienware techs and will surely help you.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/forums/alienware.1018/