Help with recovery, please.

Hello all, Could someone help me out please! I recently got an Aspire 1522LMi for SHMBO, but after looking through this forum I seem to be missing the 1st recovery CD. I have 3 disks, 2 recovery ones and a Nortons AV. I still have the hidden PQSERVICE partition (fat32), but the other partitions C & D have been converted to NTFS. I downloaded eRecovery and installed it OK, but it reports that 'Acer backup failed' when I try to do a recovery with that. Alt F10 doesn't work on booting. I have changed D: to FAT32 as I read that the recovery doesn't like D: being NTFS.

Anyone know if I could create the missing boot disk from the hidden partition? If so what do I need from it as it is quite large, too big for a CD.

Any help would be great!

 

What makes you think that the hidden partition contains the boot disk? Anyway, you did not "miss" out a cd. You need to change C: to fat32, since the recovery cds will try to install into the primary partition. NTFS cannot be accessed in dos, that is why you need to convert it to fat32. converting D: to fat32 makes no difference as what the recovery cds try to install into is the C: drive, not the D: drive.

 

Hi, So if I understand correctly, changing C: to FAT32 will allow the recovery to start from boot, i.e. Alt F10. I just want to double check before I convert the C: drive and probably lose everything of it! I thought I was missing a CD as I cannot boot from any of the CD's I have.

 

Yes, thats it. And when you run recovery, you WILL lose everything in it... the recovery cds format your drive. So, you should backup your data into the D: drive or on an external hard disk.

 

OK, here goes, I've made a couple of back-ups anyway. I'll let you know the outcome.

 

That Didn't work

Has any one any other ideas - please!

 

What exactly did not work?

 

Changed C: drive to Fat 32, but it still wouldn't allow me to use 'ALT F10' to enter the recovery or boot into the CD's. I will download Ultimate Boot CD and retry it. I haven't access to the laptop at the moment, it's at home but I will let you know in a couple of weeks.

 

The booting into cds is F12/F2 i thought.

 

I have a Ferrari 4005 and the same issue. Alt F10 doesn't let me boot into the recovery software. Any suggestion?

 

Alt F10 opens the recovery software in windows, but not when booting. I get the problem with 'Acer backup failed' when I try to use the recovery program this way. I think I noticed Arconis reporting the PQSERVICE partition as 'Compac', could this be causing the problem or is it a red herring?

 

I deleted all partitions on my acer and used the recovery cd's to reinstall the OS. The first cd basically looks to make sure the system is an acer system and then asks for the second cd which installs the OS, the third cd then installs all the acer apps and drivers.

So you have to have cd one to do a restore.

 

Is there an auto-recovery program at boot? I was under the impression, from Acer's manual, that Alt F10 does this at POST.

 

I recently bought an Acer notebook (Travelmate 4000) and deleted the PQSERVICE partition, I assumed the images is on one of the recovery CDs.

The CDs work except at the last stage where I was asked to insert the 1st (bootable) CD again, at that stage it apparently customizes the installation. It stopped at 40%, Windows was able to boot but wrong screen resolution and an Aspire 1680 wallpaper.

Does someone have an idea how to recover the partition structure? Does someone have an image of the PQSERVICE partition?

 

I just bought a aspire 5024 notebook.
It had (according to partition magic) following partitions:
fat, none, primairy, pqservice, 2.25
c: fat32, active, primairy, acer, 45.26
d: fat32, none, logical, acerdata, 45.26

It seems that the (delivered) system disk needs these partitions in order to do its thing.
You should feed the beast with the (two) recovery disks after the system disk.

 

Could anyone let me know where I could get a copy of the first bootable disk, without using Acer customer services (who said that replacement CD's would be about 50 GBP)?