Aspire AS5920G - Recovery problems!

Hey folks!
I've got an Aspire 5920G. As soon as I've got it I've creted "Factory default recovery dvd" with the eRecovery tool. It made me 2 dvds. After that I've deleted all the partitions on the hard drive (including the hidden ones, since I don't need D2D recovery as I have the dvds now).
Heres the problem: I've booted up with the recovery dvds, it loads both of them in approx. 20 minutes, and after system restore is finished, it requires a restart. Here's where the problem lies: after restart, I get an "Operating system missing" error message.
Right now I have installed OEM Vista and activated bz phone with Microsoft with the serial number on the back of the device, but, does anyone have an idea why on Earth my recovery dvds don't work???
Thanks alot!

 

It is possible (though unlikely) that the DVDs relied on files that were in the recovery partition. I find that hard to believe though.

One possibility is that the recovery DVDs also restore the Master Boot Record (actually I'm sure this happens). However, the MBR points to particular partition numbers...and since you deleted a partition...the numbers are now wrong.

With the recovery partition on there, this is probably how your partitions looked:
0) Recovery partition
1) Windows partition

Now, you have...
0) Windows partition

If the MBR on the recovery DVDs was set to look at the #1 (and not #0) partition for the OS...well, no wonder it cannot find the OS.

But that's only a theory. In all reality, you are better off with a fresh install like you have anyway.

 

I was having the same problem with a Aspire 3690 that I was redoing for a friend (bad drive). Like you tnyynt hitting a dead end all the time. Hopefully you can use my solution. Through my quest I reloaded the hard drive then removed it from the lap top and slaved it out to another machine using my handy (USB to IDE cable). ALL THE FILES were there, so looked at the BOOT.INI again no problem, took notice that the drive was formatted with FAT32 but even after this ran many experiments. Then it dawned on me while skimming through this forum. The solution was this.

Just reload the machine using the disk set of course you will get (OS can’t be found) shut down machine remove drive and slave out to other machine either 2000 XP or Vista go to disk management locate the drive (BTW you won’t see it in explorer, don’t worry)when you find it, hopefully it is FAT32 if so just right click on the disk and “set as active”.

Your done return to the laptop, should boot after that.

 

A couple of things I noticed when I was using the vista restore disks on my 5920.

The restore function will not partition/format your hdd. It will copy all the files you need onto the first partition of your HDD.

What I would do if I were you is download a knoppix live cd. and use gparted to partition your HDD. make sure to format the entire volume to rewrite the mbr.

 

Thanks for thee feedback Guys! Unfortunately I didn't write down the size and type of my partitions. I have a 320 GB hard disk and I know it had 4 partitions, 1 ACER, 1 DATA and the other two were recovery, but can't tell the sizes. Does it matter? And, do they have to be FAT32 all of them?

 

If running Vista then your installation drive should be NTFS as should any drive that you would access in Windows. The hidden drive should be formatted as FAT32 and should be around 6 gig for that machine. Drives C and D should be approx 50% of the available space after the hidden drive has been created

 

From what I recall, there were 2 hidden drives: one had around 3-4 GB and the other around 9.

 

Could be, I know that the hidden drive needs to be quite big so 9G sounds good. But don't think there was a second one. All of the recovery files, and software to install them should fit into the single hidden partition but I could be wrong. It's been a while since I recovered one of them. Hope it goes well

 

I know for sure there were 4.