8204 Restore and Hard Drive information

So, having messed up my OS completely I had to restore, so here are a few things I learned along the way.

1. The hard drive (at least in my 8204) is NOT a IDE hard drive (not sure if anyone expected it to be, or just didn't know) it is a SATA hard drive.

2. SATA 2.5" Hard Drives plug into the same slots as 3.5" Hard Drives (this is fantastic since just last weekend I got a 3.5" SATA Hard Drive enclosure, otherwise I would have been a bit buggered until I got one for various reasons).

3. If you need to restore and have changed partitions around, Fdisk the drive and remove ALL partitions (not sure if this applies if you haven't removed the hidden partition, but I did a restore with just one partition and the computer wouldn't boot at all, then removed all partitions, restored again and it worked (thank goodness)).

4. Restore does NOT need the hidden partition to reset to factory default, nor, does restore create the partition structure used on base installation, after restore the PC has one partition (assuming you FDisked and deleted all partitions) that is approx 112GB in size (remember hard drive sizes are quoted in bizaro world where 1000bytes is a MB)

Think that's all for now, just thought others might be interested since I had to restore to know that if you have made the DVD/CD it's possible to restore, but it doesn't QUITE get you back to factory fresh!

 

Hi

Just curious
I guess eRecovery hasn't been installed after your restore on a blank drive (it needs the hidden partition AFAIK).
No a great loss ...

In my case restore finished but didn't install all the stuff from the factory install so a few things didn't work (mostly related to the Acer specific stuff if I remember well). I could get it to work by faking a hidden partition and putting the Acer MBR back first (using mbrwrdos.exe and the RTMBR.BIN on the backup DVD). Apparently part of the restore process relied on the MBR.



But all this may be different on my TM8106 from your TM8204.

Cheers

Drio

 

Um, not sure about eRecovery, most other things seem to be working okay, at least so far But I just use the normal stuff, and very few of the Acer specific pieces.

I haven't tried to get the hidden partition back, to be honest I'm really glad that the drive formatted the way it did (one large partition, no hidden partitions) because now I can partition it the way I want (using a free linux partitioner) from that one partition.