Acer Veriton 7600G recovery fails - partitions lost

Discussion in 'Software' started by chookers, May 24, 2008.

  1. chookers

    chookers Staff Sergeant

    Roughly, we are having trouble using Acer Recovery disks to install XP to the computer.

    We bought the computer second-hand (ex-school machine) and it came with recovery disks for XP Home. My son and I undertook to get it up and running.

    First trick was figuring out why the HDD wasn't being detected and that turned out to be the jumper was on cable select when it should have been master, since it was an ordinary "pink" cable.

    After switching on, POST was run, then some program somewhere took over and started an installation. There was no CD, floppy, just the HDD which we had thought would have been wiped. We got no opportunity to interact with the setup; partitions, features, everything was predetermined by whatever had taken control after we handed it some mains power.

    After the install finished, we had a working Home that still wanted to finish setting things up (like drivers) and do some restarts. As far as we recall, the first restart went all right, except for not asking if we wanted to do it right there and then (so bang went son's pinball game rolleyes) but then it ran into a boot up problem and we ended up with access to only a command prompt.

    By poking around, we discovered that we had a C: recovery drive, a D: Windows and an E: recovery drive that was identical to C: (judging by file names and total size of files). We couldn't get it to boot into Windows by typing "win" at the prompt on any drive (does that work still for XP Windows?) or find any other way of getting it to boot, so tried Ctrl-Alt-Del so I could see what had happened (I'd been elsewhere when this happened and my son wasn't sure what had been said for error message) and this was a bigger disaster! After the three-fingered salute, we ended up with the HDD not existing except in BIOS.

    It turned out that the partitions had been lost somehow during one of the restarts so we assumed whoever set up the automatic install program got it wrong and used the recovery disks to install Home with the same result - after a restart, the partitions were lost.

    Figuring maybe the problem was with the disks and they were what had been used to set up the automatic install, I grabbed an Acer XP Pro recovery disk set (which are for later Veritons - NEVER used, as far as I know) and used those. Same result.

    Also, we had been having some trouble with the CD/DVD drive that led me to wonder if the drive had died, such as not responding when you asked it to open the tray which led me to wonder if the drive was faulty, causing problems with the installation.

    Every time we wanted to start an install, we also had to use a Win 98SE startup disk to set up the partitions. The XP startup disk I made off another XP machine didn't seem to be working there.

    By now, I was starting to think that either we weren't going about the install correctly, or there was a hardware problem, or Acer had a high enough incidence of dodgy disks that we'd ended up with two dodby sets obtained at different times and that last possibility seemed highly unlikely. Googling suggested it was very unlikely too.

    At this point, I decided to throw my Win 98SE disk at it and see what happened and hopefully end up with a working system that I could use to test the HDD, etc. First I used an old copy of PC Check and ran every possible check using that. Also, I enabled S.M.A.R.T. on the HDD since it's available and haven't had any messages about faults on the HDD. So far, everything suggests a normal working hardware environment (the CD drive seems fine), installed with 98SE and some drivers needed still. (Do you remember what 16 colours and 600 x 400 looks like? :-D ) Scandisk Thorough came up clean.

    So I have some questions:

    Should we set up the partitions before using the recovery disks or should that be possible using the recovery disks?

    Is there likely to be a hidden restore partition somewhere? If so, how do we find it and use it?

    Could we have a virus on the disk, maybe a boot sector virus? If so, how do we deal with it?

    Is this a common problem with Acer recovery disks?

    Any other info/ideas that people have?

    Any direct links to support at Acer, since the site seems to have some non-working links today?

    Thanks in advance all! :wave
     
  2. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member


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