Help! Factory restore of Acer Timeline 4810T

MarkDavis · 14 Apr 2011 at 22:01

Long story short, my lappy got infected with a virus and screwed everything up. Had no choice but to nuke the installation with a fomat of the whole partition.

The lappy has a recovery partition but unlike Dell / HP, there doesn't seem to be any way of accessing it through the boot up sequences, and the laptop didn't come with any recovery CDs in the box. I don't see any recovery CD ISOs on the Acer website either.

Any ideas how I can reset this to the factory default state?

Ta.

dbeckett · 14 Apr 2011 at 23:39

Try sending an email to acer customer support and beg for a cd. I managed to get a windows cd off hp a few years back by doing it

Bubba · 15 Apr 2011 at 08:24

You shouldnt have formatted the drive, what way did you do this? If you have touched the mbr then the recovery partition wont work

Alt + F10 on boot up brings you to the recovery partition.

MarkDavis · 19 Apr 2011 at 19:33

Yes!

Repeatedly hammering Alt F10 during POST works! It goes straight into the recovery options. Managed to restore the factory settings inc Vista and the original software as a result - all from the recovery partition.

Thanks for the tip!

The only thing thing though is that there seems to be more CPU load and the fan is spinning at a faster rate (always on -v- previously only occasionally on). Odd....

beermonster · 19 Apr 2011 at 20:19

Another tip is to burn the restore DVD(s) off as soon as you've gone past OOBE and stick them somewhere safe.