Totally confused...can I do this?

Bought the Aspire 5100, it has no Vista disk with it. There's the eRecovery Management utility I guess to make such a disk (apparently "disks"). Now here's my question. Should the hard drive ever fail and I just want to put in a new drive, will I be able to get Vista back onto the new drive with these disks?

The only premade system I've owned in the past ten years is a Macbook, and its pretty simple to pull the drive out of that and put in a new drive and install the OS. I keep reading stuff about hidden recovery partitions and now I'm totally confused. Can someone help step this newbe through the process?

 

Yes you will. A recovery disk contains a copy of Windows already set up and ready to go, making recovery faster than doing a clean install. A recovery partition is an area of your hard drive set aside to hold the same information as a recovery disk to make the process even quicker (since hard disk transfers are faster than DVD to hard disk transfers). Its sometimes hidden or locked out to prevent you editing it. Lots of manufacturers no longer provide operating systems CDs, only recovery disks. The disks will be locked to your computer or brand of computer but if you only replace the drive, not the computer, you will be able to recover your system.

GrandAdmiral

 

To restore your system from hard disk there may be an option on the very first screen that comes up (your BIOS screen). On my laptop it is F11. To do it from disk, put the recovery disk into your CD/DVD drive and choose boot from CD on your boot menu (usually accessed by pressing escape on the BIOS screen). This will boot you into the recovery program, which can offer a few different options or just 'restore your computer to factory condition'. Select this, confirm it if necessary and then let it do its thing. If you're restoring from disk insert the next disk when prompted. THIS WILL WIPE EVERYTHING FROM YOUR HARD DRIVE, so move all your data off if possible before you begin.

Any more questions, just PM (private message)

GrandAdmiral

 

That's excellent news. I just don't want to have to ship my computer to the States should a hard drive fail. I'd just swap out the old for a new then install the OS (or recovery disk). I'll PM my other questions. Thanks.

 

Happy to help

 

and about this subject, to make a recovery disk or partition what software do I have to install? just Acer eRecovery will do the trick or doI have to have the others in order to do it?
just asking this because acer software are resource hogs and without them , at least in my note, everything is faster!!!

 

The option on acer notebooks is ALT+F10 at the POST screen, that will start the recovery console and allow you to restore the OS from factory default. However the information about this process "wiping everything from your hard drive" is incorrect. Acer's recovery will only wipe out everything on the main drive (windows) partition (what most people call drive c). It will never touch any other partitions on the disk so if you have data backed up on another partition it will be perfectly safe and will not be erased or tampered with by the recovery process.

I know what you mean about acer software being redundant but yes AFAIK the only one that you need to make the recovery disks is acer erecovery. Install the version that is for your notebook and then create the restore discs

 

Okay, but you see, my question is will the recover disks restore the system to a NEW hard drive. That is, I take the old one out, put the new one in, and restore. Will it work? If not, I'm going to have to make a decision whether to keep this or not.

 

I'll assume it makes a complete backup because if anything less, what's the point? The idea of doing backups is to restore should the hard drive die.

So to get the backup of VISTA and the drivers, I choose "Full" in Acer eRecovery Management? Its going to take three DVDs, which seems a bit large (10.5gb).

Update: Okay, it doesn't look like those recovery disks will work if you replace the drive. It says in the Help file that "Acer eRecovery Management requires a specific hard disk partitioning structure to function. If the system detects that the hard disk doesn't use this structure, (its) functionality will be disabled." How useless is that?

 

Actually all that means is your drive has to be partitioned with a C partition inorder for the recovery discs to work. The recovery console is looking for a C partition(to reinstall windows to) if it doesn't find one then it won't work.

What you will need to do to create such a partition (in the event you get a new hard drive) is to use a windows OS disc format the drive and partition it so the first partition is called the C partition then stick in the recovery discs and you will be fine. I know this works as I have seen others do just that and got everything back up. Me I have never had a hard disc failure (knock on wood) so I have never had to do anything like this. Also I personally don't use recovery discs either as I have created my own personalized OS discs which will not install any of the acer junk when I reinstall windows. Anyway I always advise people to make the acer backup discs because no matter what that is an image of the OS that you can use.

 

This "personalized OS disk" did you make it with the eRecovery program? Or a windows OEM copied disk? I believe it is perfectly legal to use an OEM disk if you have the licence for the computer so maybe I should track down a buddy and do the same. What do you do about the Acer drivers (for the chipset, wireless card, audio, etc?).

 

Yes you are correct I did use an OEM windows disc to do that, and then slipstream the updates into the disc so as to minimize the updates I would have to download. As for the drivers issue that is up to you whether you want to slipstream them in or not as IMO drivers take almost zero time to install. This issue has been talked about a lot on the forums in the past and the general thinking is if you have the license(COA) then it is ok to do just what I have done.

 

Thanks. I'm feeling a lot better about the whole thing now and my eye has stopped twitching.

 

One more thing. Do I want a "Factory Default Disk", or a "User Backup Disk", or "Current System Configuration Backup Disk"?

 

The factory default disc sounds like the correct one but I haven't created any restore discs in over a year now so I can't quite remember. The other 2 discs are if I had to guess back up data and the second one is used to create a recovery from your current windows state. I wouldn't recommend that as if there is a problem/virus your discs will have that problem too.

 

Good. That's the one I chose.

 

Evolution,

Can you teach me or show me a link of how to make a personalized OS disk from the current windows state? I have Vista in my laptop.

 

Glad I did a backup. For some reason, Windows Update (Vista) turned my SATA drive into a SCSI Drive. Seems to be working fine. Seem to recall a number of years ago, that's how SATA drives worked, but now I thought IDE drivers handled SATA drives. Still confused I guess.

If you mean making a personalized OS disk using the method he talked about (slipstream) you need an actual Vista disk for that. Don't think you can get that from the laptop's hard drive.

 

YES it works, I did with my computer, and you WANT the factory default disks, at least for a backup.

 

Hi RobertDrake,

BTW I restored my ACER with the Factory DVD's on a VmWare system with a disk (no partition) and had no trouble. I now delete my hidden recovery pastition from my ACER notebook and restored my vista on this Notebook, I had little trouble because the restore is expecting a Partition1 and when I unhided the recovery partition this was recognized as Partition1 and 9 GB was not enough to restore so I delete both First Partition and create it back as one. Afterthat no problem for restoring (of course "alt f10" is not working anymore but you can boot with the factory dvd's) .
I thought I share this information with you

 

Does anyone know if these disks will allow me to run the recovery console? I'm trying not to wipe everything and re-install, I just need to fix a corupt file in my regitstry.

Nate

 

No it is not the MS Recovery Console it is a backup/recovery solution. You might need a Vista DVD and reboot with it in order to get to th MS Recovery Console as far as I know...

 

Depending how far back, you could do a System Restore.