Recovery Partition Structure

I have an Acer Aspire 5000 running Windows XP. My HDD had some trouble and had to be replaced by Acer. The new HDD I got from them does not have the recovery partition.

Now I do have my recovery disks and I did make a backup of my entire HDD using Acronis. However, for some reason Acronis doesn't recognize my DVD drive. But right now I am not worried about that.

To restore using the HDD backup, I just create 3 partitions for PQSERVICE, ACER, ACERDATA. Load Windows onto ACER, load the backup image onto ACERDATA, and just restore each partition individually.

But, the problem with this is, it sets the bootable/active flag incorrectly. Sometimes it sets PQSERVICE or ACER as active/bootable. Then when I bootup it loads recovery all the time, even when ACER is set to bootable. Then sometimes recovery says invalid media Abort/Retry/Fail. Its really confusing so my real question is this:

What is the partition information/structure for all of the partitions on an Acer laptop HDD?

Like I know its 3 partitions. I need to know which is supposed to be set to active/bootable, what are their filesystems, primary/logical partitions, etc. Using my Acronis backup, I want to set my hard drive to the way Acer laptops have it once they leave the factory. Since my Acronis doesn't like to work properly, I will use it in conjunction with Gparted.

 

From what I have read you need to download the post acer format software for that. It is a bootable cd that will create the partitions for you. Hope this helps.

 

I've tried that but it doesn't work. I burned the CD, loaded it, asked for my recovery DVD, then restarted, then I get some NTLDR error.

 

Do you know how to use dos. You can try to partition your drives using fdisk and then just reformat to nt and try that. What else do you have to loose.