Acer Hiden Partion Problem

Hello,

I got myself a Acer Asipre 5920 over Christmas. Since I'm not a big fan of Windows Vista Home Premium, I formatted C: and installed Windows Xp Pro over it. I got all drivers working it and everything is just fine. Now that I see that there is no eMangement applications for Windows Xp (ie. Arcade) I wish to go back to Windows Vista.

I was told to press Alt+F10 during boot to access the recovery partition to go back to factory defaults. This did not work. Acer tech told me that when I use a non-OEM version of windows, the hidden partition gets deleted.

But when I see all available partition through Windows Xp, I see the PQService partition there and healthy.

Screenshot

Does anyone have anything that could help me get back to factory defaults?

 

When you've installed xp, you've probably overwritten the acer MBR which makes the ALT+F10 function.

Try the link below, in it are some files that contain an Acer MBR for the Alt+F10 function. It's not for the 5920, but i'm lead to believe it will work on other systems. I've not used it myelf as i have no need to but it's worth a shot. Extract the files, then just double click the .bat file.

Also, is the D2D recovery function enabled in your bios.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?4myhqy2qxlw

Hope it helps.

Can you report back to say wether it works or not, cheers.

 

hello,

i downloaded your software and it worked. it wrote me a new MBR. however pressing alt+f10 at startup still does not work.

if it helps i can now access the files inside PQService partition.

 

I'm guessing d2d recovery is enabled within your bios???

Also, looking at your picture, it shows PQService as NTFS, i thought it had to be FAT32, maybe this had something to do with it, not sure though, I may be wrong.

 

yes d2d is enabled

 

It doesn't look good, i'm not sure you can do anything with the hidden partition.

There is one other thing you could try. On the acer support website, they have a vista upgrade iso. I think this was offered to people when vista first came out so they could upgrade from xp to vista. It's a rather large file and acers download speeds are not great so could take some time to download, but it's worth a shot.

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/vista_32_update/Acer Upgrade Kit 1.0.3009.iso

One more thing you could try, is see of anyone you know has a copy of vista you could use, and use the key on the underneath of your laptop. Or you could buy vista (media only) from ebay for pretty cheap.

 

Alright. Can I use a Windows Vista Ultimate disk with the serial given to me at the bottom of the laptop?

 

Yes, that will work no probs, it will downgrade vista to the version the key relates to.

 

alright i will give this a try

 

Can you upload this MBR to another site please?
Thanks

 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LJ8GNSEA