Acer Hidden Recovery Partition

Hi All,
I accidently errased the hidden partiton on my Acer laptop!. I am wondering if any member would be good enough to use norton ghost and make a backup of their hidden partition and email me it. I beleave it is just for the Disk to Disk (D2D) recovery, but still want to reinstall it.

I hope someone can help! [?]

P.S I think the Aspire 1360 possable uses the same hidden partion since it also uses the same drivers

 

have you tried the cd recovery? maybe it will re-create that partition.

 

Hi m8,
No that dosnt work, the recovery CD dosnt restore that partition. I looked on the acer website and they say once its gone its gone
Thats the reson why I am trying to get someone to make an image of that partion for me.


Baz

 

Baz999 i check the partion yestarday for you .The only way that struck me to extract it is Make another ghost copy of the partion and send it .. when i tried that its very huge comes around 1.7 Gb so its impossible for me to send it you

I am trying to figure out how acer made this partion ( hav to do bit of resarch). I know its ghost image . But i dont know how they managed to mapp ALT + F10 to the reovery partions boot loader

Once we know the procedure we can make our own custom ghost image and place it to hidden partion

BTW : I suggest you rename the Topic name to some thing like Acer Hidden Recovery Partition or better so that more users would read the thread and give there inputs

 

I have spoted such partition on my acer 1522. What purpose of this partition is? Is it necessary to exist?

 

A hard drive C partition will be fully reinstalled with all default applications, drivers and XP just by booting from the #1 CD of the recovery CD set (uses stripped-down Ghost) and following prompts. The hidden partition is unnecessary for a standard erase reinstallation.

The contents can be viewed by enabling display invisible files in folder options. Be sure to return back to hiding invisible files default to avoid getting into trouble in XP! The partition is nearly full (2GB) in my version.

 

Hi all,
The hidden parttion is quite small if i remember correctly. You can see it in Partion Magic, but it dosnt show up under windows becouse it is not a normal fat/nts partion.
The partion just allows the D2D (Alt +F10 during POST) to start the recovery proccess.


Baz

 

From Windows Disk managemnt its clear that its Primary partion and the boot loader of hidden partion is of windows 98

May be this weekend i will make and entire ghost image of disk( for backup) and start playing partion

I am considering to install windows xp pro from scratch ,load all the drivers and essential program i require and make Acrons or ghost image and place it as recovery image

FYI: With Acronis true image we can create hidden partion just as acer did with norton ghost its known as Acronis Secure Zone and we can store our own created recovery image on it and perform D2D recovery when ever we want

and there is Acronis Startup Recovery Manager which allows you to boot the hidden partion by pressing F11 during startup ( just as acer did with ALT + F10)

i.e You can create your own Recovery partion with Acronis drive image

 

Note : Please back up all your Data before attempting this . Your Partion will be deleted

After downloading NAPP cd from above link burn the ISO

Boot with newly creared NAPP CD

The system will ask if you want to build napp Master HDD -- click Yes

Then a menu will appear from that select - CD to Disk Recovery

It will ask Recovery cd, put one by one till you finish all Recovery CDs

Then insert the system CD to optical drive

and you will get a "PASS" message when system has buil NAPP master hard disk drive

 

baz999

There is tool to recover the acer hidden partion acer calls this NAPP
Acer serice engineers have NAPP cd by which we can restore the hidden partion

if want to try this here link
http://csd.acer.com.tw/SI/Download2.nsf/0/83f45555e8e5ddb148256e99002bf13f?OpenDocument

This is for TravelMate C110 but it will work for any model i guess

 

Hi George,
Well al I can say is WOW!...Thank you...I dont know how you mangaged to get that link, but that you

Regards

Baz

 

Hallo all, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the hidden partition for the 'Arcade' player to work without windows started? Isn't the data required to perform a restore actually on the 'd' drive called 'Acerdata'?
One other thing, as I've a 60g drive that's partioned in half, FAT32 limitation I guess, can I use Partition Magic to create one, larger, 'C' drive. if so which version of Partition Magic do I require?
Thanks all.....
ChrisC

 

Hi All,
Well I tried to re partition with that link....but no luck it dosnt see my DVD drive.
I done a search on that site for "D2D" and got another older version, but still no joy
It does give some error on boot, but its too quick too see + even when booted if you select Option 1 - Prepare Hard Drive, it just restarts the computer without doing anything.
I had a look at the directories and tried the wrmpmgr prep ???(or simalar) command, but it gives me error code (5)

Any Ideas?

Baz

P.S - The hidden partiton cannot be restored from the factory supplied discs, it is like a Plugin for the BIOS so you can do a D2D from the the bios

 

From what i understand

The recovery partion is Primary partion and acer have customised the MBR so that when pc loads and ALT F10 is pressed it makes the hidden partion active and loads it else make 2nd partion ( c: where windows is stored) Active and loads windows

Well NAPP CD was supposed to restore this setting . Try searching other source p2p for NAPP cd and try it out

 

Too bad I found this link too late, but I also managed to destroy the hidden partition (after starting partition magic, it said there were errors on that partition and I let it fix it).

The NAPP cd isn't available anymore though. Can any1 PLEASE help me get this one!!

 

lapino
That link is still working...Try connecting from different source . Hope you have the recovery cd then only you can reconstruct D2D partion

baz999
Since this .iso was meant for restoring TravelMate C110 . It checks for external USB CD-Rom Drive thats the reason its giving error...If you have an external HDD/Cdrom enclosure try connecting with it

 

I have an Acer Travelmate 4601WLMi, will this CD work with my laptop?

 

Hi! I backed up the service partition (with Ghost 9), and the erased it, and after some experiments, I gave up.. After I restored the partition (it took about half a day to make it all working again, and only thanks to linux bootbale cd's!), D2D isn't working! I am pretty sure it's the MBR, because I thouhgt ghost will back-up that too.. but not all of it!

Can anyone send me a backup copy of your MBR (with a working Alt+F10), please?

Thanks!

 

Has anyone here actually tried the Napp CD yet? Does it work with all Acer Laptops?

 

Still no one who have managed to restore the recovery partion?

I tried to replace the Home Edition of XP with Pro Edition, but I can't get the wireless connection to work, so I would like to restore the recovery partition.

I've downloaded the image of NAPP cd, but I also get the error the the DVD-ROM is not found.

Please help!

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by baz999

 

You can actually use the D2D recovery CD version 1.5 if you modify it a little. You have to extract the bootimage from the cd, put a generic CD/DVD driver in it (e.g.: oakcdrom.sys), modify both config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the oakcdrom.sys driver and to skip usb-drivers. Then you just burn a new CD with the modified boot-image (e.g.: In Nero, make a bootable CD, use your modified image as boot-image, select floppy-emulation) and the remaining files from the ISO. Et voila: a working copy of D2D 1.5 for notebooks without external CD-ROM-drives.

Cheers, Ray.

 

And they say Windows is "user friendly"? Anyone ever make a CD as suggested by the previous poster? Its all just a bit beyond "friendly" for this user :>(

 

Well, that's not really a Windows thing, that's MS-DOS

gosten: If you could get a wireless connection in XP Home then you will be able to get it in XP Pro? They're pretty much the same OS underneath.

 

I am planning on getting an acer laptop. Does a System recovery CD come with their laptops or is it just this partition that has the backup?

 

It comes both on CD as well on hard disk

 

George: any username and pass for that url u got? I was greeted with a user/pass login...

 

Why is it you guys are trying to restore that partition? The first thing I did was to delete the eisa partition and reinstall windows.

To my dismay, the recovery cd reinstalled everything just like it was originally.

 

hi
i can not get into this please can you help me i have a 1522 they are not letting me into th site they are asking for a password

 

...ol' Ray had some time on ol' Ray's hands.

 

Hi All,

I visited the above link but its asking for username and password.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i have an ACER Ferrari 4000 that needs recovery but booting from CD doesnt bring up the recovery menu (F12 brings up boot menu and I select DVD/CD but it goes into the corrupt ver. of XP). I think that my recovery CD is buggered so I wondered if the NAPP CD can be downloaded and used. But I'll need a username and password to do this.

Thanks in advance.

 

Try admin and admin or similar user names and pw just like the old days login into an unfamiliar passworded site<-?

 

yes it is asking for password,i tried some but it wanted a valid user and pass!

 

by the way my problem is that although the partition is all ok and untouched but then i press alt+f10 it doesnt enter the recovery process.what should i do?i have enabled the d2d recovery in the setup.what do u think?

 

If you can get a program like PartitionMagic or Partition Manager 7. These apps can create recovery disks and typically one of the neat features is "unhide" a partition. Do this and you could grab every off.

 

I MADE IT!!yes!now i can use ALT+F10 to enter the recovery options at the startup.it took some time but it worth it.i used an application available on the revocery cds which i have written before.i wuould explain more if anyone is interested to know more.
i also contacted acer and they said NAPP is not intended to be used by customers and it is jut used in repair centers.
so just one question exists.how can we make an image/backup of a customized windows?
i suggest that u dont convert your fat32 to ntfs using partition magic as i think doing using this made the recovery not to work.use with normal windows dos command prompt.i have done that before and no problem.so lets try and find how can we place an image of a customized winodws isntead of that available in the hidden partiotion.ok?

 

a good number of users including myself simply ignore and recover for regular hd space use the recovery partition. many find it filled with useless ware and most of its contents are downloadable from the acer website. if you are concerned about windows xp reinstallation you can always use a win xp installer (must be of the same version as your oem win xp so that you could safely and effectively use your oem winxp licensed key). we call this clean install. and find it improving to a great extent performance of our computers. perhaps the only thing you would lose in the process of kicking out the recovery partition is you would lose other 3rd party bundled software. but that again are mostly trial ware. so in most cases useless.

 

satellite,

If you want to make an image get a program like Norton Ghost . This can make an image of your system.

FAT32 should not be used. NTFS is preferred. This is because there are additional security and data recovery features.

Satellite, can you post what you did to get it to work. Other maybe interested.

 

ok.i booted the notebook with dos then i went to the recovery DVD which i had written before at the time of the first use.
among the various files and directiories available on the DVD;one filename attratced my attention and that was "mbrwrdos.exe" and mbrwr32win.
as i was in dos mode i ran the command "mbrwrdos/?" to show me how it works.it had an option named "Recovery" i ran that and then the ALT+F10 got to work again.it is just as easy!just be patient and try the various options for that dos comamnd.but is there anyway to change the image in the hidden partition?

 

1.
The login and passto the acer.co.tw site arew simply guest and guest.
search "NAPP CD" in google; click the link put in the pass and you are where you need to be. It doesn't have any instructions included.

Side note
you can also find utils to remove the BIOS user and HD passwords (but not the supervisor password, for whihc they'll have to open up your laptop and solder out the battery (or play with somejumpers)

2.
Thanks for figuring out how to resore the Alt-F10 feature. Now I can Probably build a customised restore.
Technicals:
Any MBR as 4 slots:
1. the bootmanager (your Alt-F10)
2. the recovery partition
3. the user C partition
4. the extended partition (which may have more than one logical drive)
So now I have to build soemthing that uses 2. to get a full backup from my USB HD into C


3.
a.
The ghost images in the recovery partition are password protected. You can find the password for your system by looking in the file Recovery.exe (search ASCII for pwd and look nearby)
Rename the one with extension .HDD to .GHO and use ghost to extract it.
b.
The image is patched for your machine with the soft on the system CD (or the stuff in the D2D directory in your recovery partition.
c.
If you patch the patch you can do this yourself. Unfortunately the patch utilities don't work in XP (they are DOS) so you have to walk through the patch.bat file and set some environment variables yourself.


4.
BTW the recovery CDs alone are sufficient to restore your system's C-drive (be it FAT32) to factory format.
(actually it used the 1st visible partition, so make sure you already have partitioned.
a.
boot from the system CD
b
it'll ask for the 1st and second recovery CD
c.
after that it either asks for the next one or simply fails
put in the System CD again and reboot from CD again
d.
now it sees the CD and runs the patch
after this you reboot and see the system start.
fill in the initial info
e.
the system restarts and you'll see the launch manager install the right drivers and utilities.
the launch manager may restart the system 1 (or maybe more times)
f.
after the next restart the patching stuff will be deleted from your C-drive and you can start working.

I suggest you ghost this image before and after conversion to NTFS.

Sidenote:
Make sure you do not have any USB-drives attached while restoring because the patch process looks for drive letters to see the type of restore needed (D2D, CD2D, Net2D)

5.
Windows keys and clean install
Most probably the key you see at the bottom of your machine doesn't work on clean installs. Acer probably used their OEM key. You can find this one in the SYSPREP directory, or with an appropriate keyfinder.
I haven't a clue how this works, both technically and legally. I cannot imagine that a clean install delivers better results, because you'll probably end up with more unneeded drivers.


Hope this adds to the recovery confusion in a positive way.


Cheers
Drio

 

your eplanations about how to find passwords and which tools and commands and applications in use were just a bit confusing.do u think u could clearify more on how we can put a customized image for recovery?tnx.

 

Yes satellite, but still "under development".

1.
With your way of restoring the original MBR Alt-F10 works again (and maybe erecovery, though I don't really care about that one)

2.
I am putting a DOS installation (derived from Win98 just like the recovery environment) in the hidden partition.
Mine is already deleted due to a major mess-up (mine).
I hope Alt-F10 allows booting direct in this environment (wh to much further customisation).

3.
Then I customise the environment with the right CDROM, USB and network drivers.
This should allowme to access my USB HD (which contains my ghosted backups in a FAT32 partition).
Probably this is only possible with an image of the complete drive (otherwise I have to start playing with the sysinternals.com tools for accessing NTFS from DOS.

Note: I have a licensed copy of Ghost. Those who haven't, may need to explore how to use the ghost from original recovery environment, which implies finding the passes it uses

Cheers

 

an original and licneced version of ghost can be found in the recovery DVD though!for those who didnt know!

 

I managed to modify the C110 NAPP cd to work with generic IDE cd/dvd drives by modifying the boot image however it appears that this NAPP cd only works with Acer systems that utilizes PowerQuest's DriveImage formats as well as the custom Acer ones (*.ACR).

My laptop (Aspire 1680 series) sadly uses Symantec's Ghost image format (*.GHO) therefore when it boots into the D2D PQ Environment it comes up with an error that says No Image Found.

A bit of experimentation on my own system netted the unfortunate loss of my own recovery partition.. so hrmm..

 

Hi, I am using 3002 and after installing Acronis True Image and setting up the secure zone, I think I have messed up the MBR. Now I wish to reinstall windows from the hidden partition but the eRecovery application will not work and further more, when I tried to boot from the system CD, the system complained of some OHCI (or OCHI?) error and failing to map memory?.... Now I have no way to reinstall the OEM OS.

I am wondering if getting a copy of the RTMBR.bin (MBR backup) and rebuilding the MBR will allow to re-access the hidden partition again? Does anyone have a copy?

 

Hi,
I have an acer 3300 notebook with athlon xp and 60gb of hard disk.
I accidently erased the hidden partition on my Acer notebook.
I tried to go to acer.co.tw site to search "NAPP CD" but I don't know user name and password.
I'd be gratefull if somebody gives me some help.
Thanks in advance.

 

@randius
The RTMBR.BIN (or whatever it is named on your machine) and mbrwrdos.exe should be on your backup DVD (the one you burned after first run) as well as in your hidden recovery partition. get a partition manager and change the partition type of the hidden partition to FAT32 and set it active. Boot into it and interrupt the autoexec.bat with Ctrl-C. After that look in (probably) acer\tools for mbrwrdos (type mbrwrdos /? for the syntax) and the rtmbr.bin.

hth

Drio

 

@RickyRg

You won't find or get a NAPP CD from Acer for your machine, though you can send the machine in for a factory reset (at cost coz not normal warranty)
The NAPP's seem to be series specific, so if you find one (e.g. the one for the C110 at Acer.tw), it wouldn't help you.

Just keep your backup DVD save (duplicate it), it should be sufficient to recover your machine (except for the hidden partition)

Or order the system CD and recovery CDs for your machine from Acer.


hth

Drio

 

Can tou send me a link for Napp cd or user name and pass for acer.tw in case you have it.Many thanks in advance.
Doru

 

Could you please also send me the link or username/password for NAPP cd?

I have an Acer Ferrari 4000 WLMI.

Here's a link for the Ferrari 4000 Service Guide:
http://127.0.0.1:4664/redir?url=\\k...chema=8&start=1&s=i7h4880O4LC78zFlBn5spA2exT0

It's a very long link, so it might not work properly.
Copy the shortcut from the blue textline above and paste it into your internet browser, that might help

Regards Henning_T