Recovery32 Type Mismatch

I have an Aspire 4720z that had a hard drive failure. I replaced the hard drive with a new Seagate and went to the Acer support pages. Since I was foolish and never followed the process to use the e portion to create recovery disks, I had to purchase the recovery disks from the Acer website. When I start the system disk, it goes through picking the language etc. and then tells me to insert the first recovery disk. I do this and it pops up a warning about making sure you do not have any external drives......make sure you want to do this as this will reformat the C:......etc. At this point I click next to go on and it pops up a Recovery32 Type Mismatch error and won't go any further to recover my system. Based on all the reading that I have been doing on this it would seem that there may be some HDD formatting issues that I need to resolve, but I am at a loss. Anyone have any thoughts on what I can do to successfully use the recovery disks. Thanks.

 

Read my signature links , about HDD preparation, and limitations.

 

Welcome to NBR

I'd try to repartition and reformat. First try to create only one partition, C:\ with NTFS then try to repair. If this doesn't work try with FAT32..

Do you remember how your HDD originally came? One partition or two? What file system was used?

 

I want to say there were 3 partitions, but I do not know for sure. I figured that I would just replace the hard drive, put in the recovery disks and voila I would be back up and running. How do I load NTFS and these other things that folks are saying I should try to use? I have a production department at my job that would help me, but I want to make sure I tell the the correct thing about this Acer and how many partitions etc. So is it safe to say that the error is due to the fact that I have an unformated hard drive? Additionally, do I have to match the factory partition schema in order for the recovery discs to work?

 

Any luck?

Lets say the new hard drive is empty and the two DVD's contain a full recovery of Vista Home Basic for your Acer...

There should be no problem but clearly there is!

The thing that might be an issue resides in the BIOS. AHCI / IDE SATA mode select. Don't know why it would have changed to IDE mode but as the 4720 support page has AHCI drivers perhaps this is the mode that should be used.

However, if this mode is selected in the BIOS then try IDE to see if that works.

You should not need to partition your drive prior to using a recovery DVD. It should restore all automatically. A BIOS setting maybe the cause of your woes...

 

I will try the AHCI setting and see if that makes a difference or not. I will report back. You are correct that the HDD that I reinstalled is an empty, unformatted HDD that I purchased to replace the bad HDD that came with the notebook. I thought the same thing which is that I should be able to pop the recovery disks in and shazam it would work, but that does not seem to be the case as this thread has detailed. I will let you know how this works.

 

Tried to use the recovery discs with both IDE and AHCI settings and still am getting the recovery32 type mismatch error. Not sure where to go from here.

 

How do I format and partition the drive? Would that help or hurt my efforts here. The biggest problem is that Acer cannot (actually will not) tell me why this is happening. I figured that it would be an easy fix since they sold me the discs after getting my serial number of the laptop, but not so much apparently. Any help would be appreciated.

 

I belive "type mismatch" refers to filesystem. I'm in the process of recovering my hidden partition, and i met the frase there. In my case I have a fat32 boot sector while the rest of the hidden partition is not ordinary fat32. PC Inspector identifies it as fat12, and I'm starting to believe its right. It's defenetly the first recovery tool that has gotten all the files back.

 

At this point, I just need to find out how to get the recovery discs that I have past that type mismatch error that keeps popping up. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

 

Format the disk in Fat32 and try again.

 

This is interresting...

The last two post about type missmatch and FAT NTFS...

There are ID markers within the MBR. Acer use several of their own ID's to indicate the hidden partition. It may help as you say to create 3 partitions to help with recovery - Acer disks you bought should to this but possibly becuase of their security checks fail.

PTEdit32 (will run from BartPE or XP Live CD) and PTEdit (DOS) can change the partition ID - or just use Paragon Hard Drive Manager

Have three partitions

1 10GB ID 27 format NTFS (the ID is Acer Hidden Recovery)
2 50% of remaining space ID 07 and active C drive NTFS
3 the reamaining space ID 07 NTFS

Next time you get a missmatch boot to a Live XP CD and see what partition IDs are used for your hard drive.

...

Also D2D enabled/disabled?
Pressing Alt + F10 actually alters the boot/ID status of partition 1 (recovery)
- this may change the ID to a NTFS ID or old FAT32 ID by mistake!

 

Well, I'm assuming it's a partition problem because I've seen this issue before and the problem was fixed with repartitioning/reformating. Unfortunately "Search" is temporary disabled so I can't find that thread now. But I guess you might be right too I've never had this problem myself so..

 

Just as an update...and I want to thank all of you that have helped. I am not a complete dummy, but it is obvious to me that I don't have near the insight nor expertise that most of you seem to have. I was able to finally figure out how to fix the HDD to take the recovery discs. What I had to do was reimage the HDD using InitialHDD.iso. I found through the following link..... http://acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/...rds=All&keywords=inability to reload&areaid=2. Once I burned this image to a disc and then reimaged the HDD, I was able to run through the recovery process flawlessly. I am now having another issue that gives me the following error:

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable.
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM.
Operating system not found.

This seems curious to me because the HDD was available to reimage and to load the recovery discs on, but now it acts as if the HDD is not there at all and is giving me the above error. I checked the BIOS and the HDD is first in teh boot sequence, so I am not sure where to go from here. I am going to try a couple of other things and see, but any advice would be welcome.

The biggest thing is that I wanted to, again, thank all the folks out there that kept helping. Your skill helped to continually point me in the right direction. Thanks again.

 

Any luck with fully recovering your laptop. I also am having the same problem replacing my hard drive with the same expectations, that it would be an easy fix.

 

I was able to recover it, but to clarify, the image that acer provided was not the correct image, therefore, I was getting the errors that I described later in the post. I would be a liar to tell you that I was able to get it fixed on my own. I actually have a coworker that works with computers as part of his job for my company, so he was able to take a shot at it. What he finally told me was that on his last gasp attempt, he was finally able to get it to boot up. In order to do that though he had to reimage the hard drive with a 30gb partition and a 290gb portion. He then ran the recovery discs that acer provided and it took. There were some other issues that he ran into, but that is beyond me at that point. Sorry that I cannot be more insightful for you. What I can tell you is that the recovery discs will not work without the partitioned hard drive and the other issues that I have noted.

 

I know how I solved this problem for myself. I have not posted here before, but found this thread while looking for a solution.

My issue was that I replaced a hard drive in a customers Acer 5520 because the old drive died. The CDs from Acer (new CDs) came up with the "type mismatch" message. I found that the recovery CDs will create a partition on a new blank drive, but not mark it active. I simple connected the hard drive to my XP computer and used disk management to mark it active. Then reran the recovery disks and they worked. My CDs only created 1 partition using the whole drive. Logical since as long as you have the CDs, there is no future need for a "recovery" partition.

I am posting this here for the simple reason that when the next person searches for a solution, I hope they will find it here and not have to pay Acer for tech support to solve the problem.

 

Update:
AFTER I told them I solved the problem and no longer needed any help, they sent me the following link:

http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/fo...d=7117&words=All&keywords=HDD reload&areaid=2

This was part of my response:

"...I see from the page that you sent me that you have known about this problem as far back as 2006. WHY THEN would a set of CDs I paid good money for last week STILL HAVE THIS PROBLEM!. (I should be asking for a refund at this point.) Also I serched your site and did not find this page. MY error was "type mismatch". Searching for this error did NOT bring up this page when it could have helped. And IF you are going to expect someone to use another computer to make this special repair CD, you should include the easier and faster solution of using the computer to simply create a new partition. That would save your customers the time consuming process of downloading and burning a CD. Your company REALLY needs to fix these CDs before you sell them and improve your tech support...."

Again, just hoping to help out someone with the same problem, but thought some people might find this interesting.

Have an excellent day!

 

A virus crashed my disk, so when I tried to do the restore, I still had the original 3 partitions on my disk. My first problem was that I had to make sure all were formatted correctly (NTFS). The next problem I encountered was that the recovery disk tries to install to lowest numbered partition, which on my system was only 10 GB. This failed. I reconfigured my system with only two partitions after which the recovery worked. What a shade-tree operation ACER is.

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Thanks to everyone that posts in these forums.

Here's how I overcame this problem with my Acer machine:

I used and old windows disc that came from another computer and began a re-install by deleting all the existing partitons.

I then created 1 large partition and followed the comands to format the hard disk. Once the format hit 100% complete I removed the old windows disc and inserted the 1st Acer recovery disc and followed the promps.

It worked !! I'm so proud of myself .