Acer 5671WLMI recovery problem

I've been quite pleased with my acer thus far, until this evening, after deciding to recover the factory settings. All works well until the last minutre of reformatting when I get the message - cannot find preload.tag. I get this with booting from the partition in the hard drive, and I get it when I use the recovery disk when I bought the computer three months ago. All I did was convert both C and D drives to NTFS two days ago. And from what I have read today, that shouldn't affect the reboot at all. Does anyone know of a solution to this?

 

Id didn't work for me

try putting an empty file in the root dir C:\ called PRELOAD.TAG.

disconnect all USB storage devices (or anything that also cause a drive letter).

More info:
Look on the first recovery cd in the patch directory and trace the whole patching process (that is the processig after Acer rebuilds the factory image: thye first copy the image back and than patch it based on the machines circumstances)

Unfortunately most of their non-batch utils to test system settings don't work because they are for 16 bit systems (the recovey partition is actually Win98).

If you want to test the patching "near-life", you could try extracting the factory image from the other two regovery disks.
Just rename *.HDD to .GHO and use Symantec Ghost to extract the images. Probably it asks for as password. This can be found inside the Recovery.exe file ("AIM1R8" wh quotes for my TM8106 XPP)

When you understand the process you can do a patch after loggin in in save mode after the first restart after the normal recovery process.

it appears that the way the patch process detemines it's source and destination (and existence test files) messes up patching and thus messes up your configuration, both with and without a recovery partition.

eRecovery and NTFS doesn't seem to work

 

Another feedback :

I had the same problem after trying to install a Linux distribution.. I don't remember exactly the origin of the problem but eRecovery didn't want to restore the factory settings.

I had created the images into my hard disk (acerbp01.x and .wsi files) but not into CD/DVD. I tried to burn those files but it didn't work when I booted with the DVD that i created.
When eRecovery tried to restore the factory settings, i had many errors (cannot find c:\preload.tag then x:\preload.tag and others...).

Under linux, i saw that there was a file preload.ta_ on the Acer's EISA partition. So i copy it into the C:\ drive (there's nothing special in it, so a blank file should be sufficient), then I had only the X:\preload.tag error message.

I didn't know how to attribute a drive letter to this partition, and i had tried many other solutions so far, so I burned the whole EISA partition under a DVD (i was on a "live cd" => knoppix, so i copied it into another partition, then i installed Windows XP Pro and then i transfered it into my PC computer through wireless/cd burning, because i believe that my notebook isn't able to burn dvd..)

Anyway, i booted on the DVD which had the same files that Acer's EISA partition... but nothing happened. So i launched Windows and then i ran "d2d32.exe". Got the same Preload.tag error messages, i copied the file into the C: drive and then eRecovery tried to access X:\d2d\images (directory which contains the backup images files).

I realised that it tried to read the files on the DVD in another location, so i changed the CD-DVD drive letter to X.

The i started again, and suddenly i saw the backup that i made into my hard disk at the first boot of my notebook. But i get new error messages, so i chose the "factory settings" and then, after one or two error messages, it restored correctly the factory settings on my C:\ drive.

Sorry for some mistakes I probably did because I speak french usually.

Maybe it will help someone, so keep hope!

 

Some other forum members said that Acer eRocovery doesn't support recovery in NTFS, only FAT32. So if you converted to NTFS, you're out of luck. Try to do a clean install of XP and then go to acer's support site and download the drivers.