Accessing an Aspire M5641 Restore Partition

Stg-Flame

Diamond Member
Mar 10, 2007
3,602
542
126
First off, yes this does pertain to my other thread.

Secondly, I have searched his house top to bottom and the OS that should have came with the stock PC is nowhere to be found. He informed me that he threw away all of the boxes that the PC came with, so it is slightly possible that he tossed the disk.

Two quick questions:

1) How do I access the Restore Partition/Recovery so that I can repair or restore the PC to factory settings? I have checked through the BIOS as well as the Setup menu by pressing F12 on startup, but that just resulted in a BSOD every time I tried that method.

2) Would I be able to use my Vista 64-bit Home Premium copy on his PC and use the Recovery/Reformat option that way? He has 64-bit the same as me. So I assume it would work, but I cannot be sure.

If I am unable to get this done, I will refer him to one of the professionals in our area who will undoubtedly charge him out the ass.
 

Ksyder

Golden Member
Feb 14, 2006
1,829
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try alt+f10 to access recovery partition. if that doesn't work google search for acer recovery partition and I'm sure you'll find other possible key combos.

I'm guessing there is no disk that came with the pc. I have an acer laptop and the e-recovery software prompts you to make recovery discs from blank dvds or cds when the machine is new.

The best choice is to run the recovery partition program which will set you up with the proper drivers. Then you can run windows update and pc decrapifier to remove all of the trial software. I'm pretty certain that that hard drive will have a hidden recovery partition which is not accessible or visible through windows except when viewing hard disk partitions.

As a note, it is good to have both the recovery discs AND the recovery partition on the hard drive. This way you are covered if you get a dead hard drive and lose the original recovery partition. Also if you decide to simply upgrade to a larger drive you will be able to install the original licensed o.s. that belongs to that machine.