D2D Recovery - reset entire drive?

My apologies if this has been discussed before but I looked through a bunch of related threads and I'm still not 100% clear on this.

I'm looking to restore the C: partition on a TravelMate 4060 to factory settings either with the recovery partition or the recovery disc I made when it was purchased. I understand this process uses a drive image to replace the C: but will it erase everything on the D: as well? Will the second D: partition even exist afterwards? I read that the process replaces everything on the drive leaving you with just the one partition - no recovery partition no nothing.

The partitions on the drive are the same as when it was bought. 1 hidden recovery partition and 2 FAT32 partitions.

 

hi mate i am having problems with my travelmate 4060 too my mate took it to repair it because the alt + f10 function for system restore did not work so he formatted the c drive and reinstalled it with a windows xp cd but i dont have any restore cds for this laptop so if u could be so kind would you run me a copy of the restore cds off please because i have been trying to sort the laptop for weeks now and i am desperate.

 

can any one please help me i am desperate the d2d recovery is not working on my travelmate 4060 and my mate to it to try and sort it but he formatted the c drive and reinstalled it with a windows xp cd so now it is telling me my laptop is not a D2D system which i know it is so if anyone could help me by sending me a duplicate copy of there restore cds for this laptop i would be very happy to pay for them because i am very desperate now.

 

To make it absolutely clear to you and any other new acer users the recovery partition or recovery CDs that you make will only revert drive C back factory default (i.e. XP Pro, Home, MCE with Fat32 file system). It will not touch any other partition on your harddrive so make sure any data you want to keep you place it on the D partition as this will not be touched during recovery.
This is my second acer notebook and I have done this practice for years without problems(however other data backup methods like DVDs should also be used )

To the second poster in this thread your mate's problem is the fact that he has wiped the factory installed windows off the machine and used his own copy of windows to over write it with.
The reason ALT+F10 does not work anymore is because when he did that he overwrote the Master Boot Record(MBR). You see acer has a special MBR that they use that allows the alt+f10 functionality to work and if you don't use the factory version of windows when recovering and use another "outside" copy it will over write that acer OEM MBR.
However if you friend still has the recovery partition then all is not lost. He will have to access that partition(called PQService) and copy the 2 files called mbrwrwin.exe and rtmbr.bin to the C drive you need to have a C drive for this to work by the way.

Installation ( Note I know this works with the factory windows I don't know if it will work with your outside copy of windows)
All you have to do is type the following in a dos prompt (worked in xp command shell too)
mbrwrwin install rtmbr.bin <-----(type that in the dos prompt)

it will add the file to a slot
Once you have done that reboot the computer and wait it took a while, it then seems to find new hardware don't know what it finds then do a reboot and then you can alt+f10 to your heart's content
hope this helps the both of you...

 

mbrwrwin install rtmbr.bin - i tried typing this in the dos prompt but it told it couldn't find the file - i'm in a similar predicament as keypress - but i have managed to get my laptop working again (not factory reset) just put a fresh copy of windows on and updated all the driver files from the acer site.
If i wanted to go back to the factory reset (if i ever wanted to sell it) is there any other files name it could be called??

i didn't recieve any recovery disk with the thing - but any further help would be great!!

 

The reason why it tells you it cannot find the files is because you need to have them on the C drive then run that command those files are normally stored in acer's PQservice partition(recovery partition). You have to access that partition and copy the files onto drive C.
If you no longer have acer's recovery partition then you have no reason to need these files because alt+f10 will lead you nowhere.

What I mean by that is if the partition is gone then having alt+f10 working will be redundant as the partition it is pointing to is gone. If you did make the backup DVDs at first boot up then you will have to always use those to restore the OS to factory default.