Aspire 5630 Recovery - no dvd's, alt f10 not working

Hi there,

I wondered if I could please ask for some help? A friends laptop won't boot into windows so I was asked to look at it. I've used ubuntu to grab all the data she needs off it and thought I would delete all partitions and reinstall xp. But having read around, I understand that deleting all partitions and installing a fresh xp copy may cause me some issues...? So I haven't done it....

In that light I thought I would try the alt f10 route, but this won't work either. I have made sure that D2D is turned on in the BIOS, so I can't see that as being the issue.

I have no recovery discs available, and I can't get into windows in any way to copy the files from the secret partition that I've seen in other instructions.

Would anyone please have any idea of how I may be able to get this laptop recovered?

I would be massively grateful of any help. Thank you.

Matt

 

Fn + F10 may work in some cases instead of Alt + F10

 

When you say you used Ubuntu, did you install it, or did you use the LiveCD?

If you installed it, it may not be possible to use the ALT+F10 recovery, as installing a new OS overwrites the ACER MBR, which pretty much renders the recovery function useless.

 

Hi there. Thank you for the replies. I used ubuntu as a live cd. I have not installed anything.

Unfortunately fn + f10 has not brought up the recovery either.

Any more ideas?

Also, what is the issue with deleting all partitions and installing a fresh copy of xp?

Again, thanks for the help.

 

There’s no issue with a clean install. You'll just have to download all the apps and drivers from Acer Support site to make everything work.
None of them will be up to date so if you have the time you should probably look for more recent versions but these available at Acer are guaranteed to work and you need some of them anyway (like Launch Manager)

 

Hi downloads, thank you for responding to me. I may well end up trying to delete all partitions and do a fresh install then.

 

Just thought I'd mention in case anyone else searches for this in the future:

Alt - F10 brought up the boot options screen that I was getting as an issue anyway, and therefore I thought Alt - F10 wasn't working.

Silly I know, but it fooled me.

After hitting "boot windows normally" it DID go into the restore process.... kind of.

The first thing it did was do chkdsk /f and repaired the MBR etc and got the laptop booting normally without the need to wipe, resinstall, nor lose any data.

It may well have been me being stupid, but if I could have found this info at the beggining it would have saved me a LOT of time getting data saved elsewhere.

Thanks for the help above anyway guys. Massively appreciated.