Mystery Manor Adventure Forum

I keep all my CDs very carefully in the one place, especially the Recovery disks, but I have found SO many things missing from this house since Girl Friday went.

I have found a CD called Acer Disk Formatter Application CD but as I have two Acer laptops, I really dont know which Acer this CD applies to. Should I try it on the off-chance that it works??

You could, but the disk formatter title leads me to believe it will only wipe your disk, not restore it. Do you have any idea if this Acer has a recovery partition on the disk? It should say is in the computer's User Manual. What is the model number and I can look it up for you if you don't have it...

It's an Acer Aspire 8920G, Drac

Any idea what sort of Folder I should be looking for, Drac?

Just looking for the Manual now!

Edit: This is what the Manual says:-

"This recovery process helps you restore the C drive with the original software content that is installed when you purchase your notebook. Follow the steps below to rebuild your C Drive. Your C Drive will be formatted and all data will be erased.

Before performing a restore operation, please check the BIOS settings.
Check to see if Acer disk-to-disk recovery is enabled or not.
Make sure the D2D Recovery setting in Main is enabled. Exit the BIOS utility and save changes. The system will reboot.
Note. To activate the BIOS utility, press F2 during POST (what does POST mean Drac?)
To start the recovery process:
Restart the system.
While the Acer logo is showing press Alt F10 at the same time to enter the recovery process.
Refer to the onscreen instructions to perform system recovery."

It's not a folder; it will be a completely separate partition you can boot into. If there is one, you may see a message of some kind when you are booting up such as F(some number) for Recovery or something like that.

Edited my previous post - I hope you saw it, Drac

I also found this link:-

http://www.pctechbytes.com/acer/acer-as ... partition/

Awesome, Rosaboobie! This is exactly what you need. POST means the "power on startup test." It's when your computer is checking to see that all is well. Why don't you try repeatedly tapping the F10 key while the system is booting up to see if you enter the Recovery Utility. If you don't, then you will need to enter the BIOS to make the change they are talking about. Despite my teasing about the BIOS in another thread, it's really not that intimidating at all! But give the F10 a try during boot up and see what happens. Do not do with with a restart. You must do it from a cold boot, meaning the computer is actually shut down and restarted.

But do get anything off the computer you want first, as it appears once you enter the Recovery utility, it will restore your computer back to all the factory settings.

Yes, I am still backing up everything first onto flash drives, but it seems to be taking forever.

Then tomorrow I will do this project.

So, maybe the CDs dont even exist??

From what I read, you would have had to create them yourself. So if you do get it back up and running, you should use their utility to create some recovery disks.

Right, well I will let you know tomorrow if I was successful or not in getting it up and running again - Thanks for all your help once again, Drac!

Fingers crossed, Rosaboobie!

Alt + F10 got me nowhere, Drac. Just gave me the same old "safe Mode" choices.

Is it possible to do these Recovery disks now, even though I am only working in Safe Mode?

You have to hit the Alt/F10 at just the right moment. Shut it down and try again by holding down the Alt key and constantly tapping the F10 during the boot up.

When I boot up, it only gives me the options F2 or F12.

I am still trying to do Alt + F10 like you said, but no success so far!

It probably won't list all the options that are available.
Don't forget to shut down computer off after you've unsuccessfully tried Alt-F10. If you just reboot, it might not work. Things like going back to factory defaults are sometimes not available if you simply reboot before trying again. (I learned this the hard way)

One other thing you could do is try F8 (or Alt-F8) which should give you the Safe Mode menu. Sometimes computers have restore options listed there.

What do F2 and F12 give you? Do you have to use the Alt key for those?