HELP! Recovery problems!

Hello,

I'm was thinking about returning my acer 8204, and I wanted to use the recovery disk that was made to make everything back to its original form. The problem is.... I converted my drives to ntfs and reformatted it with a different windows xp cd.. So I basically tried to use the recovery disk... and it went through the process but when it restarted, i received an error... "ntldr is missing".

I think the problem is because I converted the drives to ntfs, and the recovery disk is having problems going back to fat32?? Anyone have any solutions? I can't boot into windows. What i really want to do is put the factory defaults back in...

Please help..

 

How about deleting the partitions?

 

I put in a regular windows xp sp2 cd and booted to the setup screen for windows xp. It showed me the list of partitions.. It looks like the partitions are back to the factory default, but i can't boot into windows.. I still get the ntdrl is missing message...

I don't see what deleting the partitions will do? I want to restore everything back to when I first bought it so i can return it. The bios has also been updated to 3315... not sure if thats the problem?

Regards.

 

well reformatting would erase the contents of the hard drive so you could use the restore cd on a blank partition....

 

the recovery disk automatically restores ALL the partitions, and puts windows on the computer. It also formats each drive as FAT32 (how it came). The problem is that it wont boot into windows.. it'll juss loop the message "ntdrl is missing" message.

 

Contains of your boot.ini is wrong. Something like ERD Commander 2005 may help you to edit boot.ini.

 

hmm thx for the info leo, but what i don't understand is.. why my boot.ini is wrong. Also.. does anyone know why my alt + f10 isn't working for d2d?? Could it be because I updated the bios ? :|

 

I updated my bios to 3315 before, but my lappy original came with 3511. Is there any harm in downgrading a bios??

 

ok.. so i downgraded the laptop to 3311... and tried the recovery disk again... The wierd thing is... when the recovery disk sets all the drives up.. its making the D: the windows xp directory with label "ACER" and making the C: the "ACERDATA" directory. So what I tried doing is deleting the C: partition, and letting the laptop boot again.. I don't get the NTDRL message anymore, but instead it says it can't find an Operating system. Now.. what I'm thinking is that the laptop keeps trying to boot from the C:, even though the D: is the OS... anyone know whats up? why is my recovery disk making my D: the main drive to install to?

 

can you not go to the boot menu to manually boot off of d: then set that as the main boot drive, or am i just way off?

 

the recovery disc will not work on an NTFS partition. You have to format the drive back to FAT32 and then it will work. this is the same for D2D.

Fdisk it and you will be fine.

As far as which partition. I am not sure if the recovery will run on the first partition, or if it is hard coded for the C: drive. Have not run across this. Let me know if the recovery will run on the D: drive.

 

Are you sure? I've recovered the system on NTFS partition from the oryginal Acer's CDs. I've used Ghost from Acers hidden partition manually on another PC with only NTFS partitions and it worked properly.

Marcel

 

Yep. It only works one time in the life of the notebook. Once you replace the factory-installed system, you can never use D2D again. Crazy, but true.

 

I went through that several times with my 3004LC1. It took about 3 install attempts each time until it went through. For some reason, the Acer desn't like to write everything most of the time. The thing worked for me to break the cycle was to reinstall the XP Pro (or whatever), then use the recovery CDs to put it back to factory specs (except for eRecovery- you lose that forever.) Oh, make sure you bring up and select CD boot from the F12 menu at startup.

 

Same here. The first time (and only) I used D2d was after I'd converted from Fat32 to NTFS. Went okay.

Also, you can find downloadable eRecovery for a couple of other models, but they are not interchangeable, or least not for my Aspire 3000. It hosed my Acer and is why I have so much exprience reinstalling systems on them