This tutorial may also help you do it on other brands of computers.
Disclaimer: First of all, you should be aware that some of the future operations may cause irreversible changes to your hard drive, I highly recommend and will never do enough to backup your system before launching anywhere. dangerous operation. Any damage and/or modification made to your system will be under your entire responsibility. The following procedures were done on an Acer Aspire 5102wlmi and some also worked on a Dell Inspiron 9400/1705.
As you know, Acer computers and those from other manufacturers now ship with a system restore installed on a hidden partition on your hard drive. This system is started by pressing the ALT+F10 keys simultaneously. And sometimes for various reasons this system stops working.
The first cause is usually due to the fact that the D2D Recovery function is disabled in the bios (main menu).
The solution : Enable the feature and try pressing the ALT+F10 keys during computer startup.
The second cause: in this case the hidden PQSERVICE partition was deleted or damaged, or you replaced the disk and in this case it is not present.
The solution : If you have not previously backed up your system by creating an image disk. It will not be possible to use D2D recovery. Your only hope will be to have the Acer Recovery CD/DVD in your possession.
And the third cause: the Acer Master Boot Record (MBR) was damaged or replaced with a non-Acer MBR. As long as the PQSERVICE partition is present or you can get your hand on the necessary Acer files, you can reinstall Acer’s MBR.
The solution :
first method : on a functional Windows system:
1 disable the D2D recovery option in the bios.
2 Open a Windows session with an account administrator.
3 Download, unzip and run partedit32 (registration required to download).
4 Identify the Pqservice partition by its size (at the bottom of the part edit window there is a partition information box) it is a small size partition about 2-6 GB. Once done, change your partition type to 0C and save. Reboot and log in with an administrator account, you should be able to navigate to the PQservice partition. Find these two files mbrwrdos.exe and rtmbr.bin once located, open a command prompt and start this command mbrwrdos.exe install rtmbr.bin, this will install Acer MBR. Close the command prompt window, reboot Windows again, enter BIOS and reactivate D2D recovery. ALT+F10 should now launch Acer recovery at computer startup.
second method : We have a non-functional Windows system.
For that, you have to use a Linux distribution (for me, Mandriva provided all the necessary tools).
1 Boot into the Mandriva installation CD/DVD, the boot menu will give you the ability to repair or restore the Windows bootloader.
2 If that’s not enough, start a Linux installation (this will be an occasion to test this terrible operating system) and choose LILO as the bootloader (a boot menu that allows you to choose between several operating systems) after the installation is complete . Reboot your computer into the bootloader menu system, you will have at least 2 windows options, the first one usually points to PQservice, select it and it will boot directly into acer D2D recovery.
The last solution is the simplest, just keep in mind that during the linux installation you will have to resize your windows partition to create a place for a new linux partition, it is the most dangerous part because it is irreversible so So take your precautions at this time.
