System Recovery Options

lintasiril said:

I tried booting from my win7 INstallation disk but there is no option for "repair computer or system recovery "
any other way to solve this? thank you

You have to click here and there a bit. it will show up eventually.

It was the same for me.

This disk helped me to get out of a really nasty situation on my Acer Notebook the other night so I felt compelled to share this little nugget of gold to possibly help somebody else in the same situation I was as nobody else anywhere knows about it (to my knowledge):


I discovered this little trick last night on my AS5738PG-6306 Notebook when my “Acer eRecovery” Factory Image Restore disks failed, and I happened to have a Windows 7 Recovery Disk. I found that through this disk you can tell the system to have Acer eRecovery Management to restore the system to Acer’s Factory Settings (the exact same thing that the Factory Image Recovery disks do, but without using up your expensive DVD-R’s).

Please note that I have absolutely no idea if this will work on all Windows 7 Acer Notebooks.

With that said, after you have made your Windows 7 Recovery Disk insert it and restart your computer. Providing the BIOS boot order is set to look for bootable media in the disk drive, the disk should boot without you having to do anything.

Preliminary steps:

1. Secure a good quality blank DVD or two.
2. BACKUP ALL OF YOUR IMPORTANT FILES, THEY WILL BE COMPLETELY REMOVED! (e.x. Documents, Videos, Pictures, Music, game save files, etc. all).
3. Make sure that your system’s BIOS Boot Order is set to Boot the Optical Drive FIRST. (Go ahead and give this a google if you don’t know how to enter BIOS on your specific Acer PC already – Acer’s site claims you have to hold down [Ctrl] + [ALT] + [Escape] keys to enter the BIOS Setup and the hit [F12] to enter into the “Boot Menu”, though I’m unsure if this is for all Acer systems or not).
4. Create a Windows 7 Recovery Disk.
5. Load the Windows 7 Recovery Disk into the Drive.
6. Restart your computer.

Here is what is going to happen throughout this process and how you should respond:

1. “Press any key to boot from CD/DVD…” should appear, quickly press any key now.
2. “Windows is loading files…” will appear. Wait for it to complete loading.
3. Microsoft logo and loading bar should now display… wait for it to stop.
4. Language Selection Menu is displayed, choose your language and click “Next”.
5. System Recovery Options is loading… wait for it to stop.
6. Choose “Restore your computer using a system image that you created earlier” and click “Next” (don’t worry, we’re not going to do it that way but we have to click this to proceed…)
7. DON’T INSERT RECOVERY DISKS OR CONNECT ANY DEVICE WITH THE SYSTEM IMAGE BACKUP DATA WHEN YOU ARE PROMPTED TO DO SO ON THE SCREEN THAT WILL POP UP!
8. Click “Cancel” to exit out of this secondary pop-up screen telling you to load the image restore data.
9. Click “Cancel” again to exit out of the remaining and main screen.
10. A new Options Menu is displayed…
11. Select the “Recovery Management” option at the very end and bottom of the list.
12. Acer eRecovery Management Options menu is displayed.
13. Choose the “Completely Restore System to Factory Defaults” option.
14. Let eRecovery Management finish all of the steps and restart the system.

That’s it, your system will now be completely wiped out, the HDD will be reformatted and your system will be returned to the precise state that you first received it in from Acer, using Acer’s hidden recovery partition (which is where the Recovery Disks data also comes from).

After you set up your Windows 7 account information and settings and log on ‘for the first time’ after the Factory Restore process has worked its magic, Acer eRecovery Management will automatically begin reinstalling all of your drivers and OEM applications (i.e. Windows 7 Touch Pack if you are also on the AS5738PG-6306 Notebook or other Touch-Screen model) from the Hidden Recovery Partition.

Sure beats wasting three DVD-R's rather than just one, and having them not work after a while and when you really need them, huh?

Thank you. Being fairly new to Windows I am finding your Forum to be indispensable. Thank you all for the great Tutorials and other much needed information

Hey Brink,
thank you for the answer. I am seeing just the background, without the window showed in the screenshot. Now, after executing fixmbr and fixboot, the window which should appear in the step 5 is there, but is loading forever (showing the "loading" circle.)

Should I wait until it loads?

Brink said:

I'd give it a bit to see if it may be able to load for you.

What happens when you try to boot Windows 7 normally?

It comes to the "logo point", and stucks there.

Now I started the System Repair from the Console, x:\sources\recovery -> StartRep.exe. The window opened and is now showing a running blue bar, beside which is written "Search for problems". Let's see if it finds something :)