Acer Aspire 3690/Recovery After HDD Wipe

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Lunker Head, Aug 11, 2008.

  1. Lunker Head

    Lunker Head Private E-2

    Situation: Virus Attack/Trying to Recover using Recovery CD's

    I had a nasty virus attack. I reformatted and recovered back to factory defaults using the recovery disks that I was instructed to burn when I initially brought and turned the machine on (I now have two recovery DVD's). It seemed the virus survived the reformat and recovery process. I decided to wipe the HDD clean with DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke. It filled the HDD with 0's. Completely wiped the HDD, including the master boot record.

    Come to find out, the recovery disk's require the MBR to be intact for some kind of preload.tag file. Not to mention, all the partitions have been deleted that the recovery disks are expecting.

    I am getting these error messages when trying to boot and run the recovery disk #1.

    "Fail Cannot Find Volume Information" and,

    "Recovery 32: Cannot find preload.tag for setboot.ini"

    I have two advantages. I bought an Acer Aspire 3690 for my mother identical to mine just weeks before I bought mine. Identical software, identical machine. I can use her machine to copy any images I need to transfer to mine (all though I don't know now to accomplish this). Also, I have the recovery disk's that I burned.

    What I have learned thus far:

    I need to recreate the partitions back on my HDD as before DBAN. I believe it had three, C:, D:, and a hidden partition (used for a D2D recovery utility). The hidden partition contained an image of a recovery utility. I have created a UBCD, Ultimate Boot CD. I can use it to look at my mothers hard drive to discover the partition parameters that I need to duplicate on mine. The UBCD has many apps on it. I need some help in using it. I think I may also need to copy her MBR and transplant it to mine. And I also definitely want to copy her recovery image in the hidden partition and transplant that to mine too.

    I think I have everything I need to get the job done. I just don't know exactly how to use the tools specifically. I think if I can get my HDD partitioned back to spec, and get the MBR and hidden recovery image from my moms machine copied onto mine I can achieve victory.

    How was I supposed to know the recovery disks were dependent on an intact original MBR? Who knew? Seems retarded to me. How come the Acer writers of the recovery utility didn't take into account that someone might want to upgrade their HDD to a bigger one, which would obviously be devoid of the needed original MBR files? And isn't it well known that viruses are often written to infect the MBR, which would require the deletion of the MBR? Freakin retarded.

    Does anyone have any first hand experience with this Acer problem?
     
  2. discountflies

    discountflies Private E-2

    Did you ever figure out how to partition your 3690? I've got the same problem...
     
  3. Lunker Head

    Lunker Head Private E-2

    Yes I did eventually get the HDD repartitioned. Albeit, without the hidden recovery partition. I tried and tried to get it back to exact specs with all three partitions. But I could not figure out how to get the recovery disks to load the "recovery" image to the hidden partition. So... I just split the HDD into two even partitions and everything works fine. I just don't have the recovery partition utility. I have the recovery disks, and that's good enough.

    I have the specific instructions to make the partitions including how to set the MBR so that the recovery disks will load. Running a little short on time now. Will post back later with the instructions. What you do is download the UBCD (google it, you'll find it), burn a boot disk and run that. I used the Ranish Partition Manager utility from the UBCD to partition my HDD. You could go ahead and download that and figure out to make a boot CD with that for now till I post back.
     

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