Disclaimer: First of all, please backup your system before launching it in any dangerous operation, some of the coming operations may cause data loss. Any modification and/or damage that occurs to your laptop will be under your responsibility.
As you know, Acer laptops and those from other manufacturers are now shipped with a system restore installed in a hidden partition (PQ service for Acer) on your hard drive. Normally this system is launched by simultaneously pressing the ALT+F10 keys, but sometimes that doesn’t work.
What is the problem?
There are many possible causes, but the most common are:
IN The D2D function was disabled in the bios.
Solution: Enable the feature by pressing F2 during boot to access the BIOS menu and change settings, then reboot and press ALT+F10 during laptop startup.
Note: For all the following solutions, keep Max’s advice in mind, I now quote Max, a contributor on my site “But I want to mention the way I solved the problem, because it is rarely mentioned on the web. All the methods to fix D2D Alt+f10 issue are expert and clever, but they all forget to say something fundamental:
first of all you have to rebuild empty partition D:Acerdata FAT32 with a soft partition that almost everyone deletes because it is usually empty. Just doing it, everything went smoothly and the recovery worked like a charm.”
Yes, many restore attempts fail due to this condition.
B. Another common problem is that the Acer Master Boot Record (MBR) becomes corrupted or replaced by the MBR from another system. You can reinstall Acer MBR if the PQservice partition is present or if you can access the necessary files.
Solutions:
FIRST
On a functional Windows FAT32 system, the partition table values are OC or OB for the installable FAT32 file system and 12 or 1B for the hidden FAT32 partition, for an NTFS system, the known partition table values are O7 for the installable NTFS file system and 27 for Acer’s custom hidden NTFS partition:
1. Go to BIOS and disable D2D recovery option.
2. Download partedit32.
3. Identify the PQservice partition by its size (there is an information box at the bottom of the edit part window) it is the small size partition about 4-9 GB. Once done, change the type of your partition to 0C (FAT32) or 07 (NTFS) and save. Reboot and you should now be able to navigate inside the PQservice partition.
Look for these two files:
mbrwrdos.exe
rtmbr.bin
(The name of these two files can be different sometimes)
When located, open a command prompt window as administrator and enter this command “mbrwrdos.exe install rtmbr.bin”, to install Acer MBR. Close command prompt, reboot your laptop again, reactivate D2D recovery in BIOS. Now ALT+F10 should work and launch Acer Recovery when the laptop starts up.
SECOND
Someone who tried the first method but failed to find the 2 files found another solution to restore the partition.
Use partedit32 to locate the pqservice partition (on aspire 5920g, it’s the largest partition at 9gb)
Change partition type to 07 (NTFS installable), reboot.
After reboot, go to Windows computer management and mark PQservice partition as active and then reboot again.
Ready!! Now you can continue on the road to recovery.
THIRD
We have a non-functional Windows system.
Download the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), run it, and choose from the menu:
-File system tools
-Boot Managers
-Shape JAW it worked fine, but you can choose any of the other bootloaders, it will recognize the PQ service by its (hidden) type.
Just install any bootloader and use it to start the PQ service to start the Erecovery restore process.
against The last problem: you replaced your hard drive (in this case, PQservice is no longer present) or your partition was deleted or damaged.
Solution: I hope you have burned the Acer restore CD/DVD when prompted at the time of first use, because if you did not previously backup your laptop by making a disk image, it will not be possible to use Acer recovery .
Let’s give Max the last words:
“Problem solved Alan. And you are right that an external drive for data backup is very important. Yes, I have it and I backed up my data before I started messing it up…”