Acer Aspire One 110 Recovery Help

[LEK-89]

I've recently got an Acer Aspire One 110 for the gf for xmas, while I was settingi t all up (saving her having to do it) somehow the installation on windows got messed up by one of the stupid windows updates and now I need to recover the laptop back to factory setup. Problem is for some reason this Aspire One does not come with the Acer eRecovery program or the hidden recovery partition aka PQSERVICE, and when I look in disk management it only displays the original 8GB HDD & the extra 8GB SSD drive, no PQSERVICE, great! ALT + F10 recovery start up method does not work either as nothing happens (I have checked the BIOS and D2D is enabled) I am nearly stuck to what to do as I have also had supplied 2 Acer disks, one of them is a RECOVERY1 DVD and is 2.5GB in size but I ahve got no way of being able to restore it with that disk! The other disk is labeled System CD and it only contains various system files, more than likely binded with the other recovery disk too. I can't run these disks either as the Aspire one has so CD drive lol anyway I tried the 2 disk I got on my other laptop, the first disk labeled System CD runs the Acer recovery program but the option to restore the laptop to its original state is greyed out ggrrr!! - I also transfered the contends of that CD onto my pen drive so I could run it on the laptop and it did the same thing - greyed out the recovery option. If I try to boot the actual 2.5GB RECOVERY1 disk on my other laptop it does not recognise it as a bootable program or device in the BIOS, just shows the "non bootable disk inserted, press any key to restart" and so that disk is not bootable at all, but there are those .SWM image files on there but how can I make them into an image that I can use to recover? what can I do now?? I got the laptop off a known auction site from a huge shop and he sells loads of them, if all is lost shall I request a replacement from him?

Thanks all - Liam

 

[LEK-89]

Right, I have been on the phone to the original online shop I got it from, and basically told me that there is nothing they can do as they are just the re-seller and for any problems with the laptop unit I would have to get in contact with Acer direct. So rang up Acer and the guy I spoke to said that my laptop should have been supplied with a recovery partition, and after I confirmed that it definately doesn't and that the D2D is enabled & ALT + F10 functions do not do anything he suggested that I should send the laptop back to them so they can format the HDD and put a recovery partition on it, but I said to them I would get back to them. Anyway today I rang them again as I still have not got any luck with these recovery CDs that I had supplied and the second Acer guy I just spoke to confirmed that these 8GB or 16GB Acer Aspire One models (AOA110) definately do not come with the recovery partitions because of the size of the hard drives in them & that the recovery partition would take up too much room and instead the supplied disks are there to restore the system.

I told him that these recovery cds do not do anything at all and I can't even boot off them, he said that the cds I have might be incorrect ones or faulty. He then first said I should go back to the shop I originally got the laptop from and explain to them but I had to tell him again that I got refered to Acer directly from the shop as the shop cannot do anything. The Acer guy said he will put me of hold and then he came back saying that he wants proof of purchase of my laptop via email, which I have now just sent and he said I should get another email back by next week confirming that I will have some replacement recovery cds sent out to me within the next couple of weeks.

Just to quickly clarify, is there any specific way these cds work or how they boot? As with the 2 cds I have, I tested them out on my other Acer laptop - the first one is labeled "SystemCD" and it is around 500MB in size, this CD does boot up and it loads up the Acer Recovery Management in DOS but the option to restore my system is greyed out and I have no other choice but to exit. The second disk which is a DVD is labeled "Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3" and the actual size of the DVD is 2.54GB. If I try and boot in the BIOS with this DVD it does not boot from it at all as the BIOS said that it is an unknown boot disk and to restart the system, the contains around 20 .SWM files and the only visable application is called "ImageX", the rest of the files are command promts and other small files.

Thanks all - Liam

 

[Little_Crow]

Bit of a long shot as I've not bought a prebuilt machine from a vendor in years.

Have you tried booting with the Acer Recovery manager disk, then once booted to that, put in the Windows XP disk?

I'm not familiar with the utility, but maybe the files it actually needs to restore from are the ones on the XP disc The files you've described on the XP disk are certainly not a standard XP disc you could expect to boot and install from directly.

How you actually do this I really don't know without seeing the util for myself, if you can't find anything post some photos and I may be able to suggest further.

 

[LEK-89]

Thanks for your reply,

I have not tried that actually but I do not think it will work as it would still require the original 500MB CD to run, and I think it would ask me for the 2.54GB DVD afterwards if thats how the process would work, I will give it a go when I can. Just waiting to see if Acer will send me some replacement disks.

Liam