Recovery Aspire One Trouble

Many Acer systems come with the ability to press ALT+F10 to kick off the Acer Recovery applications from a special hidden recovery partition. Sometimes this won’t work and there can be a number of reasons.

1. D2D Recovery is “Disabled” in the BIOS (Main menu).
FIX: Enabled it and try pressing ALT+F10 again as the computer boots.

2. The Acer hidden recovery partition (PQSERVICE) has been removed or damaged. If the disk drive is a replacement drive then you won’t have this partition.
FIX: Unless you have previously imaged the PQSERVICE partition it will not be possible to use D2D recovery. You will need to restore from the Acer Recovery CD/DVD.

3. You have converted the FAT32 partition on the hard drives into NTFS. Acer D2D recovery won’t be available if you perform this conversion. Ironic that NTFS is a more desirable disk format to use but Acer won’t support this in their systems!
FIX: Restore your system from the recovery CD/DVD media.

4. The special Acer Master Boot Record (MBR) has become corrupt or has been overwritten with an non Acer MBR. As long as the PQSERVICE partition is there or you can get your hands on a couple of Acer service files for your model, then you can remake the special Acer MBR. Let’s cover how this is done.

1. Disable D2D recovery in the BIOS. Can be found in the “Main” menu section. Save the BIOS settings and exit.
2. Log into Windows with an “administrator” level account.
3. Download ParTEDIT32.ZIP (registration required for download).
4. Extract PTEDIT32.EXE from the zip archive and run it.
5. Identify the PQSERVICE partition by its type or size. It is likely to be 12 or another custom value and is likely to be reasonably small in comparison to the other normal partitions – see the example below from a working factory default Acer. Click to see the image full size. PQSERVICE being edited by PTEDIT32
Change the type to “07″ (Installable File System NTFS, HPFS) and “Save Changes”.
6. Reboot the computer and login with an “administrator” level account.
7. You should then be able to open up a command prompt and navigate to the PQSERVICE drive.
8. Enter the following command at the command prompt:
mbrwrdos.exe install rtmbr.bin
- You may have to search for these files and change into the relevant directory.
Note: This step writes the Acer MBR, with mbrwrdos.exe and rtmbr.bin being the special service files.
9. Close the command prompt window and reboot.
10. Go into the BIOS again and enable D2D Recovery. Save the BIOS settings and exit.
11. ALT+F10 should now start Acer Recovery as the computer starts.
12. The Acer MBR ensures the PQSERVICE partition is hidden therefore there is no need to reset the partition type back to 07 – well there shouldn’t be if all has gone well. If you need to manually reset it then run PTEDIT32.EXE again, set the partition to 12, or whatever the original value was, and save the changes to complete the process. Reboot and it should now be hidden.

If Windows is unbootable, due to whatever issue, you can always use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) along with a copy of PTEDIT32.EXE to achieve the same results. Likewise, use UBCD4Win along with PTEDIT32.EXE if the PQSERVICE partition is being changed back to a hidden one by the existing MBR. We’ll leave that as an exercise for those who need to do it! It has been pointed out in the comments that UBCD4Win already has an application that will do partition maintenance, so checkout TestDisc if you go down that road.

If this is a new drive or someone has completely wiped the drive, including the hidden partitions, it may be necessary to use partitioning software to recreate the partitions that the Acer Recovery system is expecting! You’ll also need to restore an image of the recovery partition from a previously made backup, so it is worth making that backup image straight away while the laptop is still new and shiny, and certainly well in advance of any problem.