Acer Hidden Recovery Partition

[elbmw]

Originally Posted by george_l

baz999

There is tool to recover the acer hidden partion acer calls this NAPP
Acer serice engineers have NAPP cd by which we can restore the hidden partion

if want to try this here link
http://csd.acer.com.tw/SI/Download2....f?OpenDocument

This is for TravelMate C110 but it will work for any model i guess

Hi All,

I visited the above link but its asking for username and password.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i have an ACER Ferrari 4000 that needs recovery but booting from CD doesnt bring up the recovery menu (F12 brings up boot menu and I select DVD/CD but it goes into the corrupt ver. of XP). I think that my recovery CD is buggered so I wondered if the NAPP CD can be downloaded and used. But I'll need a username and password to do this.

Thanks in advance.

[Sam1]

Try admin and admin or similar user names and pw just like the old days login into an unfamiliar passworded site<-?

[satellite]

yes it is asking for password,i tried some but it wanted a valid user and pass!

[satellite]

by the way my problem is that although the partition is all ok and untouched but then i press alt+f10 it doesnt enter the recovery process.what should i do?i have enabled the d2d recovery in the setup.what do u think?

[sonicdivx]

If you can get a program like PartitionMagic or Partition Manager 7. These apps can create recovery disks and typically one of the neat features is "unhide" a partition. Do this and you could grab every off.

[satellite]

I MADE IT!!yes!now i can use ALT+F10 to enter the recovery options at the startup.it took some time but it worth it.i used an application available on the revocery cds which i have written before.i wuould explain more if anyone is interested to know more.
i also contacted acer and they said NAPP is not intended to be used by customers and it is jut used in repair centers.
so just one question exists.how can we make an image/backup of a customized windows?
i suggest that u dont convert your fat32 to ntfs using partition magic as i think doing using this made the recovery not to work.use with normal windows dos command prompt.i have done that before and no problem.so lets try and find how can we place an image of a customized winodws isntead of that available in the hidden partiotion.ok?

[eatonop]

a good number of users including myself simply ignore and recover for regular hd space use the recovery partition. many find it filled with useless ware and most of its contents are downloadable from the acer website. if you are concerned about windows xp reinstallation you can always use a win xp installer (must be of the same version as your oem win xp so that you could safely and effectively use your oem winxp licensed key). we call this clean install. and find it improving to a great extent performance of our computers. perhaps the only thing you would lose in the process of kicking out the recovery partition is you would lose other 3rd party bundled software. but that again are mostly trial ware. so in most cases useless.

[sonicdivx]

satellite,

If you want to make an image get a program like Norton Ghost . This can make an image of your system.

FAT32 should not be used. NTFS is preferred. This is because there are additional security and data recovery features.

Satellite, can you post what you did to get it to work. Other maybe interested.

[satellite]

ok.i booted the notebook with dos then i went to the recovery DVD which i had written before at the time of the first use.
among the various files and directiories available on the DVD;one filename attratced my attention and that was "mbrwrdos.exe" and mbrwr32win.
as i was in dos mode i ran the command "mbrwrdos/?" to show me how it works.it had an option named "Recovery" i ran that and then the ALT+F10 got to work again.it is just as easy!just be patient and try the various options for that dos comamnd.but is there anyway to change the image in the hidden partition?

[Drio]

1.
The login and passto the acer.co.tw site arew simply guest and guest.
search "NAPP CD" in google; click the link put in the pass and you are where you need to be. It doesn't have any instructions included.

Side note
you can also find utils to remove the BIOS user and HD passwords (but not the supervisor password, for whihc they'll have to open up your laptop and solder out the battery (or play with somejumpers)

2.
Thanks for figuring out how to resore the Alt-F10 feature. Now I can Probably build a customised restore.
Technicals:
Any MBR as 4 slots:
1. the bootmanager (your Alt-F10)
2. the recovery partition
3. the user C partition
4. the extended partition (which may have more than one logical drive)
So now I have to build soemthing that uses 2. to get a full backup from my USB HD into C


3.
a.
The ghost images in the recovery partition are password protected. You can find the password for your system by looking in the file Recovery.exe (search ASCII for pwd and look nearby)
Rename the one with extension .HDD to .GHO and use ghost to extract it.
b.
The image is patched for your machine with the soft on the system CD (or the stuff in the D2D directory in your recovery partition.
c.
If you patch the patch you can do this yourself. Unfortunately the patch utilities don't work in XP (they are DOS) so you have to walk through the patch.bat file and set some environment variables yourself.


4.
BTW the recovery CDs alone are sufficient to restore your system's C-drive (be it FAT32) to factory format.
(actually it used the 1st visible partition, so make sure you already have partitioned.
a.
boot from the system CD
b
it'll ask for the 1st and second recovery CD
c.
after that it either asks for the next one or simply fails
put in the System CD again and reboot from CD again
d.
now it sees the CD and runs the patch
after this you reboot and see the system start.
fill in the initial info
e.
the system restarts and you'll see the launch manager install the right drivers and utilities.
the launch manager may restart the system 1 (or maybe more times)
f.
after the next restart the patching stuff will be deleted from your C-drive and you can start working.

I suggest you ghost this image before and after conversion to NTFS.

Sidenote:
Make sure you do not have any USB-drives attached while restoring because the patch process looks for drive letters to see the type of restore needed (D2D, CD2D, Net2D)

5.
Windows keys and clean install
Most probably the key you see at the bottom of your machine doesn't work on clean installs. Acer probably used their OEM key. You can find this one in the SYSPREP directory, or with an appropriate keyfinder.
I haven't a clue how this works, both technically and legally. I cannot imagine that a clean install delivers better results, because you'll probably end up with more unneeded drivers.


Hope this adds to the recovery confusion in a positive way.


Cheers
Drio