Does ACER bios have this?

It's too late for me now -

I dual-booted Ubuntu, not knowing about the stupid ACER MBR, which is not easily rebuildable like a standard Windows MBR. Thanks, ACER, for the proprietary beartrap.
Now Alt+F10 doesn't work. My recovery DVD's are useless.

Have googled a bit looking for ideas on finding/retrieving/installing ACER MBR but doesn't look promising.
I don't want anyone else to make the same mistake. Aside from virtualization, are there any solutions to running dual boot and not messing with the precious ACER MBR? I've read some comments about EasyBCD and some other bootloaders. Don't these utilities also tweak the ACER MBR, creating the same problem?

 

If your HDD made by HITACHI,then try to delete your MBR(Reset) using HITACHI Disk Diagnostic Tool.You'll lose everything & your recovery DVDs will work fine (Same thing happens to me & i do the above )

 

Thanks, bigspin -
Yeah, it is a Hitachi.
I'll check out Hitachi's website for the tool you describe. That's kind of weird that a utility from the HDD manufacturer rebuilds an MBR that's been tweaked by acer. Maybe the tweak is Hitachi's?

Is this the right place?
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

There's a whole bunch of different downloads. Do you know which one to use? Mine's an HTS54252.

 

I use Drive Fitness Test tool to erase my boot sector(MBR). (You will lose all of your previous data)

 

If the Drive Fitness Tool wipes the MBR, how do you get back to an MBR that will respond to Alt+F10?

On a side note, if Acer wants to lay bear traps with proprietary MBR's, they ought to make it easy to go to their website and download some sort of utility that will re-install their MBR.

 

You can just use linux and set you recovery partion as active it will boot you shound be able to restore

 

I'd never hacked on a laptop before, just old PC's. Went into the project unaware of the stupid ACER MBR. I wiped the drive, built an NTFS partition, and reinstalled vista from the recovery DVD's. At least I knew enuf to make the recovery DVD's
But I don't have the recovery partition on the HDD anymore.

vista started up just fine, so I went ahead and installed Ubuntu to the rest of the drive, letting the GRUB bootloader do its thing to the vista MBR. Ubuntu worked fine and I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Ignorance is bliss.

Then I read a post that mentioned Alt+F10 wouldn't work anymore if the ACER MBR had been modified. Checked and found that's true - the Acer doesn't respond to Alt+F10.

I have the recovery DVD's, which worked the first time around so I know they're good. The trick now is figuring out how to get the Acer to start the recovery mode so I can reinstall vista. This isn't an emergency right now because the lappy's working fine. But I sure want to find out now if there's some way to reinstall vista, even if it entails wiping the drive and starting over.

 

Give this a try - it worked for me.

http://www.roundtripsolutions.com/blog/2007/10/18/300/acer-disk-to-disk-d2d-recovery-broken/

 

Checked out that website - thanks for the directions.

"4. As long as the PQSERVICE partition is there or you can get your hands on a couple of Acer service files for your model, then you can remake the special Acer MBR."

Looks like I need those files for my Acer 5920-6470. I wonder how model-specific the Acer mbrwrdos.exe and rtmbr.bin files are?

 

I can't remember if I found those files on my recovery DVD's or if I found them on the PQPartition... I do remember having to do a search for them though.

 

Do you really need the ALT+F10 option? As soon as I got mine (pretty much) I made the backup DVD's and wiped the PQService Partition.

Worked just fine to reinstall from the DVD' (just had to wipe the hard drive of all partitions first, otherwise things went a bit wonky)

 

Arla -
How did you get the recovery DVD's to start doing their thing without using the secret Alt+F10 handshake?
I tried running the recovery DVD's way back before messing with the ACER MBR. With the PC set to boot from optical drive the recovery utility wouldn't start. It said "Windows loading Files" then just stalled. Once I found out about Alt+F10 the recovery started.
Now that Ubuntu's messed with the MBR Alt+F10 doesn't work to start the Acer recovery utility.
I'm still not clear on how the BIOS settings, Acer MBR, and recovery DVD's work together to make things difficult. It's not making sense.
Oh, yeah, I looked in my BIOS and didn't find the "Boot from D2D" setting like I've read about either.

Damn proprietary stuff...I thought it would all work pretty much like if I had a Windows disc.

 

Well, now I'm more confused than before, but wanted to report back in case this helps someone else.
With a standard Acer laptop (my 5920 at least, and it sounds like most everyone else's too) you have to tap Alt+F10 to start the Acer eRecovery utility.
I burned the recovery DVD's when the lappy was new, then screwed up vista and recovered via Alt+F10 and the recovery discs.
Then I dual-booted Ubuntu without knowing about the proprietary Acer MBR. GRUB of course tweaks the MBR unless you specify otherwise.
I tried Alt+F10 afterward, and now the laptop does NOT go into Acer eRecovery.

After reading Arla's post, I tried booting from the #1 recovery DVD without tapping Alt+F10. The laptop went into eRecovery, asking which language I wanted to use. I stopped right there.

So, happy to report that it appears you can still use your recovery DVD's after allowing a Linux bootloader to tweak the MBR. You just have to not do what you had to do beforehand. By that I mean Alt+F10

If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably try EasyBCD, which as I understand it allows one the freedom to dual-boot with vista and NOT mess with the MBR. Maybe someone who's using EasyBCD can confirm that??

 

They are a bit different in different models but more or less alike. When PQSERVICE is unhidden and assigned a drive letter, check what's inside it. Instead of having "mbrwrdos.exe", you may have mbrwrwin.exe. Read the comments as well in that site.

On a side note: if you do recover the Acer master boot record, whatever windows you have in the drive probably won't work anymore as the mbr is replaced with the one that Acer has in the hidden partition.

So, my suggestion is that don't do it just for the sake to have Alt + Fn10 back so you can do D2D when you want it; do it if you have to use it to recover your system.