TravelMate 2480-2779 Recovery

Okay guys and gals, I have done something really stupid and I seriously need your help. I bought a TM 2480-2779 about a month ago and it came with Windows Vista Home Basic pre-installed, I upgraded to Home Premium and everything was fine. Well........ the other day I decided it would be nice to have my XP professional installed as well so I proceeded to create a dual boot configuration by installing XP on the D: partition after which I was only able to run XP pro and not Vista so I decided to get rid of XP and tried to access the recovery by pressing alt+f10 during boot(first enabling d2d recovery in the bios) however it would not work and then I decided to just reinstall vista from the upgrade disk and then delete XP and also not thinking that once I re-installed vista I would then lose the use of Acer erecovery so even after that I attempted to reactivate vista and it refuses to recognise my Pkey, I also tried to re-install the upgrade but is says that the license can not be installed from the version of Windows I am using. So what I need help with is how to recover the factory default configuration without having access to the d2d recovery function or erecovery and without having ever made backup recovery disks. I know about the ghost partition, but I don't know how to find it or how to use it to recover my system so I am hoping that one of you more technically advanced people can help me figure this out, oh and I contacted Acer support to ask them what to do, the guy told me that they do not support nor advocate dual boot systems and for that reason they are unable to assist me.

Thanks in advance for your help

 

Welcome to the forums...

WOW there is so much here for you to do.... First things first I agree with what acer told you in not supporting dual boots especially with users who don't exactly know what is going to happen and can potentially mess up their computers. You see your problem is that you installed XP(in a dual boot configuration) after you already had vista on your notebook. This was a huge mistake Vista and XP even though they are both from Microsoft actually install and work completely different from each other. Here is the reason why vista wouldn't work after you installed XP( you could try Microsoft's solutions listed on that page but I don't know if they will work for you). As a rule of thumb always install the latest windows last that way it is always guaranteed to be backwards compatible with anything that came before it .

As for why it isn't accepting your license key you said you had home basic pre-installed and you upgraded home premium well are you perhaps mixing up the 2 keys? Remember a home basic key will not work with home premium...

I am always surprised when I hear acer users on the forum saying that they didn't create the back up DVDs when they first turned on their notebooks. I don't know why you would want not to do this because now you are going to have quite a bit to do to get that notebook working again whereas if you made the backup DVDs it would be so much simpler(i.e using a DVD is alot easier than having to access the recovery partition on your drive once alt+f10 is gone and erecovery no longer works).

I will tell you how to access the hidden partition but if this doesn't work then I don't know what else to tell you except you may have to wipe the hard drive and do a fresh install, which means the hidden partition might disappear .

In a nutshell what you have to do now is put in the windows vista disc at startup(set the CD drive to boot first in your bios for this to work) and I think there is a new partition management program Microsoft has to replace Fdisk with in vista don't quote me on this however. Once it starts you will have to make the PQservice partition( acer recovery partition) an active partition then restart and remove the vista CD the notebook should boot to the recovery partition you just set as active. Go through the windows recovery process, restart, then put the Vista CD back in and and set the C drive back to be the active one instead of the recovery partition. You can either use the vista CD or create a bootable CD and use the same procedure as above but using the old dos Fdisk program.

I hope my explanation was of some help to you, perhaps some other forum members can chime in here and help you out further if they have any other ideas.

 

Thanks so much for the reply Evolution, however I figured out how to do it and it was so simple. I found a neat little tool called cute partition manager(freeware) on download.com and made a bootable cd then restarted the computer, changed the bootup drive to cd/dvd and then rebooted again and like magic there was the "hidden" partition set to not boot, I changed that to be the bootup drive and rebooted again and erecovery automatically started. Then it asked for a password and I thought oh no a factory set password, but after I took a guess the next screen had a link for a "hint" and low and behold it was MY hint for my password that I set for Acer enpowering technology and after that it took about 7 minutes to restore the factory default and then it was just a matter of waiting to reinstall everything again like the first time, now I have everything back and I have already gone and bought some cd's to create a backup because I will not make that mistake again. I just need to re-install the upgrade and everything will be back to normal.


Thanks again!!

 

Glad to hear you got it sorted.. but remember make sure for future reference that if you re going to dual boot vista and XP then install XP first and vista last

 

I think that after this I won't bother with dual boot ever again, but at least now I know what not to do and if I ever did try again I most certainly will install the oldest OS first. Thanks again for your help, I am so glad to have people like you who are willing to help those of us who are not exactally technically intelligent.

 

and make sure the first thing you do with any new laptop or pc. make a bootable recovery dvd or cd

 

it's a worry when the first thing the laptop splashes across the screen is, make bootable dvd now or later......do it now:cry: