Acer erecovery

[TC91]

hey guys, i recently got myself an acer 5920 laptop; its specs are following if you are curious:

t5250 1.5ghz 667fsb
2gb ddr2 667mhz
250gb hdd 5400rpm
gma x3100
vista home premium

i was wondering about the acer erecovery software and if anyone with an acer laptop or desktop machine would know if the backup disks you made using the erecovery would work in the case your hdd was really damaged or if you wiped all of the existing partitions somehow and let you boot from it and completely restore the stock condition of the laptop? in windows computer management, under the disk management, i see 4 partitions, the c partition, the d partition, and 2 other hidden partitions, one is 9.76gb and the other is 2.3gb or so, i think that is where the acer erecovery gets its data from if you use it to restore your hdd, but say if all of those partitions were wiped, would the backup disks let you restore everything back to normal? thanks a bunch for the help in advance.

 

[JustaGeek]

Yes, they will let you recover everything to the original, factory shipped settings.

The hidden partitions are there to do the recovery from the same Hard Drive, but if you have to replace the Hard Drive, you can use the CD's.

I had an Acer laptop that would ask me to save the settings on a DVD, after the initial configuration was performed. Never used it, but I used the CD's that came with the Laptop to re-install the OS and the Software.

 

[TC91]

thanks for the reply JustaGeek, appreciate the help.

 

[gus6464]

Does your Acer come configured with 2 partitions? My old Travelmate 4400 came with 2-50gb partitions from the factory and the restore disc did the same thing. It was pretty annoying and it also formated everything in fat32.

 

[TC91]

gus6464, thanks for the reply. yah my acer has 2 partitions that can be seen in vista, but on the disk management under control panel>admin tools>comp management, i see 2 other partitions that are hidden, one which is 9.76gb and the other is around 2.3gb, but yah there are 2 usable partitions. i plan to try out linux on my laptop, maybe osx, and just wanted to know about the backup thingy before i toyed around in case it was not reversible if something got messed up. thanks for verifying my question, appreciate the help.

 

[JustaGeek]

My older Acer came with a 100GB HD with 2 partitions formatted in Fat32, and yes, the recovery disks did the same thing.

Had to manually change the File System to NTFS. And I don't have it any more, actually...

@TC91, I would recommend that you get a new Hard Drive for "experimentation", this way if anything goes terribly wrong, you still have the original system drive.

A laptop Hard Drive can be had for 60-70 bucks, so it is not worth "tinkering" with the only HD you have, IMO.

 

[TC91]

alright, thanks for the reply again JustaGeek, appreciate it, that sounds like a good thing to try, but i am not 100% sure about opening up my laptop as i ve never done it before. i ll check out disecting a laptop on the net somewhere, and hopefully its easier than i think it is. a friend of mine said it took him 10hrs to open up his hp/compaq laptop and to reassemble it afterwards to upgrade its cpu.

 

[gus6464]

Acers are very easy to upgrade the hard drive. Just unscrew the plastic plate with the hdd label and it is right there. All you do is pull on the plastic tab, take out the hdd, remove it from the cage and replace with new one.

 

[TC91]

wow, that sounds pretty easy. thanks again for the help gus and JustaGeek too, i appreciate it.

 

[Rottie]

10 hours work on HP/Compaq??? Now you are making me nervous about my compaq!

 

[gus6464]

Upgrading a CPU is a totally different story than upgrading a HDD. You have to take the entire thing apart and take out a ton of screws to upgrade a CPU. You can't really compare the two.

 

[TC91]

ok thanks again Gus. i guess i was assuming that replacing the hdd would mean to take apart the entire laptop to access the hdd. thanks for clearing that up for me.

 

[TheVrolok]

I have an Acer Aspire 5102wlmi and I can tell you that if the partition table of my laptop is modified, the Acer recovery utility WILL NOT work properly. That drive, and partition table, need to be in the factory default for the recovery (from HDD OR removable disc) program to function properly. Is this the case for all Acer laptops? I don't know, but it IS the case for mine. Personally, I just reformatted the thing, installed clean with an OEM copy of MCE and use Ghost to create restore discs.

 

[TC91]

thanks for your reply Vrolok. i have read about modifying the partitions and what not will not allow you to use the erecovery built in as it resides on the hidden partitions, but have you tried using the backup disc? doesnt the factory default backup disk that you make with the erecovery on first bootup completely restore the hdd to its original stock state if anything goes wrong?

 

[TheVrolok]

Originally posted by: TC91
thanks for your reply Vrolok. i have read about modifying the partitions and what not will not allow you to use the erecovery built in as it resides on the hidden partitions, but have you tried using the backup disc? doesnt the factory default backup disk that you make with the erecovery on first bootup completely restore the hdd to its original stock state if anything goes wrong?

I actually created backup DVDR's just fresh out of the box just to see if I could recover from them if I ever wanted to (I had planned to reformat/knock out the partition table since day 1). What I found was that even with the backup DVDR's I COULD NOT use the Acer recovery software. It would boot the first recovery DVDR and start the app but after awhile it would error because it didn't find the proper partition table and stop. So short answer, no, I couldn't even use eRecovery with backup discs if the partition table is destroyed.

 

[TC91]

thanks again for the reply Vrolok. whoa, too bad to hear about the dvd's not working out for you. i guess if anything really goes wrong with my windows and the erecovery can not fix it, i can use my old winxp again or go to linux.

 

[TC91]

for anyone who has a newer acer laptop/desktop who is interested about the erecovery, i messed around with it, and the backup dvd's do work, even if the hard drive is wiped. in the case the hard drive is wiped, all you need to do is to make a C:/ partition somehow, and the backup dvd's that you made using the erecovery software will work. if the hard drive has nothing on it, then you will get an error.

 

[ToXiCRaGE]

I got an Aspire 5920g and was wondering the same thing. I made 'backup' DVDs using the eRecovery program and (I hope) saved my factory settings on the DVDs including Vista.

I have formatted the HD and am using XP, however, I did leave the hidden partitions in tact. I hope I can go back to Vista with the 2 DVDs that eRecovery made (Acer Customer Rep said I can but I sometimes doubt their knowledge).

 

[elfnumber1]

Ok, here's my experience with Acer Laptops as well as a HUGE question that I'm totally stumped on.

Rig: Acer Aspire 3690 w/ 80GB HDD with several partitions.

I low level formatted the drive with the appropriate Hitachi tools. So now it's a blank drive just like Vrolok likes it. Realized you CANNOT use the eRecovery discs created or purchased without first creating the proper partitions. Since I had no memory of what those partitions were, Acer Support says to download an .ISO file that will basically fdisk and format to factory settings then you can use the eRecovery CD/DVDs. I run those next and it completes without any issues. Here is where the problem lies, when I boot up next, it states no OS found on the HDD.

I took out the HDD and set it up as an external to my system PC. It loads fine and I can see all the OS and system files on there are in tact. However, the HDD is still one large partition. My first thought is that the MBR or BIOS is defaulting to boot from a partition that isn't there or wasn't created. How do I fix this so it knows to boot from this specific partition?

Is that even the issue?

-elf

 

[elfnumber1]

bump, please help

 

[TC91]

Originally posted by: elfnumber1
Ok, here's my experience with Acer Laptops as well as a HUGE question that I'm totally stumped on.

Rig: Acer Aspire 3690 w/ 80GB HDD with several partitions.

I low level formatted the drive with the appropriate Hitachi tools. So now it's a blank drive just like Vrolok likes it. Realized you CANNOT use the eRecovery discs created or purchased without first creating the proper partitions. Since I had no memory of what those partitions were, Acer Support says to download an .ISO file that will basically fdisk and format to factory settings then you can use the eRecovery CD/DVDs. I run those next and it completes without any issues. Here is where the problem lies, when I boot up next, it states no OS found on the HDD.

I took out the HDD and set it up as an external to my system PC. It loads fine and I can see all the OS and system files on there are in tact. However, the HDD is still one large partition. My first thought is that the MBR or BIOS is defaulting to boot from a partition that isn't there or wasn't created. How do I fix this so it knows to boot from this specific partition?

Is that even the issue?

-elf

hey elfnumber1, i got the ercovery disks to work in the end after playing around with other operating systems on the laptop (i completely wiped the hdd afterwards since i didnt want the linux grub bootloader which still lingered), what i did was use my vista disk from my desktop (in sig) and installed vista on the laptop and i didnt enter a cd key so it installed as a trial version, and then i ran the erecovery backup disks and it worked perfectly and overwrote the trial vista installation that i put on (remember to enable the disk to disk recovery thing in the bios).