Vista and XP Dual boot

First of all thanks for all the info here...

Now, here's the problem, i have a acer 5100-5674, it came with a preinstalled Vista Home Premium, i bought it from CircuitCity and i was stupid enuf to not burn the recovery disks.

Somehow, i managed to get it work with a xp installation too(dual boot), now the original acer MBR is probably overwritten by xp. I want to factory reset my Vista, but as i dont have recovery disks and Alt+F10 is also not working, i am losing my marbles...

Is there any procedure that i can get my ALT+F10 working with a dual doot...

Note: I hav read all 17 pages of recovery procedures on dis site but no good for me !!

 

17 pages wow! Other than recommending NOT duel booting Vista and XP, there's not much I can do to help you.

I tried this about a month ago on my Clevo M570U. Fortunately, I was clever enough to burn the recovery disks, so formatted my hard disk and all was fine.

Really sorry but I can't help you. In future PLEASE remember to burn recovery disks - no matter what people say about them - they are useful!

 

Thanx anyways....

but its not a big deal to dual boot...only if i get my hands on dat factory reset thing...i'll find a safe way of doing dat...

 

HIRENS BOOT CD PROB SOLVED research it

 

the problem isnt that you didnt burn the recovery disks, the problem is that the acer 5100 doesn't give you the to option to make any recovery disks. they put a 10gig hidden partition on the hard drive that replaces the recovery disks and is only good to recover the system not repair. to boot both you need to run vista repair to fix MBR. but i dont know how to find that option on an acer. although i do know someone who has done this but they are out of the country for the weekend and so i will try to have an answer by tuesday.

PS. acer must have an option to send a copy of vista to those who have the 5100, if the HDD ever needs replacing you will lose that 10gig partition with the recovery files on it.

 

anybody knows where i can get the recovery disc for acer 5580?

 

Sorry if this reply comes too late... but your "Alt+F10" problem can only be fixed if you use the recovery discs that fill in the recovery partition portion of your original OEM setup. And actually, there is a way to burn your own recovery discs for the Acer units. You must use the eManagement console (the big green "e" bar with the icons on it) and choose the eRecovery program, setup a password (initially), then choose "burn disc". It will give you options to make a full factory disc, current setup disc, & a drivers applications disc. I'd say your best bet to dual boot Vista with XP and still keep the recovery partition (assuming you get the laptop restored) is to install XP afterwards. I'll leave the instructions on how to do that to your favorite search engine. Hope this helps.

 

Hi,

I have a 5101 which i now have dual booting, but came originally with XP media centre and although i burned the recovery disc it was unable to read one of them when i went to restore and also found that Alt F10 stop working for some reason(this was before i had dual boot). I discovered that by using a programme called Super Fdisk, by booting that up in the CD drive i was able to change the hidden restore partition to "active" then restarting with the cd tray empty(otherwise it'll boot back into Super FDisk) it should go into the recovery mode. Once the OS has been restored re-boot with Super Fdisk and change the partion back to "hidden" and C drive as "Active" and reboot with an empty Cd tray.

 

you could by the recovery disk from acer. I think there like 40 buck or something, you would have call and find out. also note all acers have the option to make a recovery disk, they also do have the partition.