Acer recovery question

Hi, all -
I just finished reading the lengthy Recovery Partition restore thread. Bought a 5920 last week at Circuit City. First thing - build the recovery DVD's. Then tried to re-size the C:\ partiton, and move/resize the D:\ partition, with GParted LiveCD (GPLCD) to make room for Ubuntu 7.10.

It didn't work. Vista wouldn't start. Just endless looping thru Acer boot screen then restart.
And my recovery DVD's didn't seem to work either, but I didn't know about alt+F10. Thought you just threw them in and booted from optical.
A kid at Circuit City's Firedog desk said to wipe the drive.
While zero-filling the drive I went to Acer's website and found out about alt+F10.
Panicked. Stopped the zero-fill at 60%.
Tried recovery DVD's again with alt+F10. Got Acer splash screen, then language question, then error message "Type mismatch".
Went back in with GPLCD, which saw one continuous partition "unknown". Formatted it as NTFS.
Tried again with recovery DVD's and alt+F10. It worked. Vista re-installed. End result was one big C:\ partition, all others gone. Vista functioning but the little gear in Empowerment widget inoperative.
Back in with GPLCD. Resized C:\.
Restart Vista, it runs SCANDISK, fixed whatever it was that it didn't like, and successfully started.

With only one partition, instead of the original four, I now had room for Ubuntu! Went in with GPLCD, created one extended partition, then /, /home, and swap inside.
Haven't installed Ubuntu yet but don't anticipate problems. Famous last words.

So, to get to my questions finally - is the Acer recovery gear thingie supposed to inactivate itself after you've built your recovery DVD's, or perhaps after you've used them the first time? I thought that what with all my screwing around that I'd broken it, but after reading the recovery thread I'm under the impression that the little gear in the Empowerment widget is supposed to die after you've used it once?
Does anyone understand what alt+F10 does? Does that command tell the lappy to look at a specific folder in the #1 recovery DVD? That's the only thing I can think of.
And is all this rigamarole simply Acer's way of making sure the end user doesn't do something illegal/questionable with the recovery data?

 

What do you mean by the recovery gear thingie? Specify that... Also you need to make the partition that you installed Ubuntu bootable...or else it wouldnt work. Go to the ubuntu forums for a complete setup detail they explain things throughly there! You have to do a few configurations in grub and something with the vista boot manager to get both operating system operational so you can multi-boot.

If the recovery gear thingie=the widgets acer gives you that does things such as power management recovery sound and other things, then my answer is no? they should still be there after you install the recovery dvds...had to do that many times with my acer to restore to factory settings but it seems to be running fine and nothing seems to be missing except the fact that it wipes all my data out so that my vista is a 'clean' install.

 

No it does not inactivate itself, D2D feature allowing boot from either backup CD/DVDs or from hidden partition. Unless the hidden partition is removed, which then would only allow restore from DVDs (assuming backup DVDs have been produced by owner. From my understanding I think you will have lost option to restore from hidden partition, when you reformated the drive. ALT F10 is a bios function, which remains then even if drive has been fully reformated - hence you can still use D2D with your back discs.

I think so.

Yes or to the hidden partition if still there.

No I just think they have very poorly communicated the options to the end user, and haven't made it very visible what backup / recovery options are available. Their backup/recovery process and options are sound - but their lack of clear communications means a user doesn't find /understand them until they need it and they are digging deep to resolve an issue - by whichtime it is too late. Hidden partition is blown and usually no backup discs have been made.

If your hidden partition is gone, you may be able to recover it (since you have recovery discs) by following:

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Rep...very&id=794500

Also note you formated drive as NTFS - D2D recovery is only available for FAT32 drives.

Alternative recovery details page:
http://www.roundtripsolutions.com/blog/2007/10/18/300/acer-disk-to-disk-d2d-recovery-broken/

 

I'm very thankful I did make the DVD's before messing around with the HDD! At this point I don't think anything is screwed up except that gear icon so i'm ok with the results.
When new, there were four partitions: two EISA, one C:\ and one D:\. After my misadventures there was only one.
To Acorn, what I meant by the "gear thingie" is one of the functions within the Acer empowerment utility. I don't know what previous iterations looked like, but in my new 5920 it's a green bar that hovers over the desktop with some utilities for internet, sound, etc. The last icon to the right is a little gear that went into some sort of recovery or configuration utility. Now it just gives me a little red circle with a stripe thu it when I hover the cursor over the gear.
So from what you guys are saying it sounds like I'd still have that function if I'd done some basic homework on how to use the recovery DVD's instead of getting all flustered and wiping out the EISA partitions.

Oh, well. I bought the lappy for Linux anyways. I'm not sure the Acer Empowerment widget does anything that can't be done from within Vista.

hkeyzer, I second your comments about poor communications. This thing came with a tiny manual, and most of that was not in English. I've bought motherboards that came with bigger manuals! But my bad for not calming down, taking a deep breath, and researching first.

 

I guess you can use your gpart livecd to boot again and mark the recovery partition (the one around 9gb in size) as "boot" and boot the notebook again (remove the livecd cd first), recovery should start. I also disabled D2D recovery from BIOS before doing this. If recovery fails it may be because you've resized the 2 big partitions of harddisk, you may resize them to factory defaults before running above steps again.

After the recovery complete you don't need gpart again as the recovery system marks "boot" to new vista installation partition automatically.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Ilker Ustuner