Acer Switch 10 - Reinstall Windows from scratch / fix boot partition

mokawi

Hi,

 

The first thing I did when I got my Switch 10 was to try to install Ubuntu. It worked in the sense that it is now on my hard drive, but I repartitioned the whole drive and thus removed the windows boot partition, such that it doesn't recognize the disk anymore.

 

I want this fixed. One solution would be to reinstall Windows, but I don't have a recovery disk. Any idea how I could do that?

 

Otherwise, any idea to fix the boot partition would be very appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

Louis

xyzaid

i think it should be difficult if you don't have any (?) recovery disk...

why not just reinstall ubuntu from scratch ? did you do it with a ubuntu cdrom or a bootable usb key ?

 

by the way, can you tell us how well ubuntu is working on the switch 10 ? is everything working out of the box ? (wifi, bluetooth, touchscreen??)

IronFly

Ubuntu live works very slow and only 105 of hardware is supported.

 

the only think i can suggest is to burn Hiren's boot CD to an USB and see if you are able to make recovery partition bootable or clone that partition to your PC and try to create a bootable USB pen, probably you will need to wipe all the SSD to make recovery installation working.

 

so steps for the 2 solutions are:

1) create a bootable USB pen with Hiren's boot cd

2) try to boot to Mini xp or Linux with partition magic

3) clone the recovery partition (if any) to an external USB pen or USB HDD (this just for safety reasons)

4) mark as bootable the windows (Acer) recovery partition ONLY

5) try to boot from this partition

i suspect it will not work, since the recovery will not find the factory partition or enough space to re-install windows

 

 

or

 

1) create a bootable USB pen with Hiren's boot cd

2) try to boot to Mini xp or Linux with partition magic

3) clone the recovery partition (if any) to an external USB pen or USB HDD

4) create a bootable USB pen from the cloned partition content

5) wipe completly the SSD

6) try to install from recovery USB pen

 

as last resort:

Acer recovery media
if you are in the US you can buy it:
http://store.acer.com/store/aceramer/en_US/eRecovery

if you are outside the US, you must call/email your regional Acer support service:
http://www.acer.com/worldwide/support/#_ga=1.157815354.1650522051.1412414371

mokawi

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xyzaid wrote:

i think it should be difficult if you don't have any (?) recovery disk...

why not just reinstall ubuntu from scratch ? did you do it with a ubuntu cdrom or a bootable usb key ?

 

by the way, can you tell us how well ubuntu is working on the switch 10 ? is everything working out of the box ? (wifi, bluetooth, touchscreen??)

---

Reinstalling Ubuntu didn't work. I used a bootable usb key.

 

Ubuntu's demonstrably slower, as IronFly noted and as witnessed in other forums, but I can't really tell how slow it is because all I got to work was the usb key livecd. It's long to boot, but once the gnome-shell is set up, the speed is fine. Apart from that, I can tell that the keyboard and wifi don't work out of the box, and fixing it involves recompiling the kernel (for the keyboard) and a driver (for the wifi). The touchscreen can also be difficult, although I suspect it can be dealt with suitable configs. There probably other stuff like power management that won't work.

mokawi

---

IronFly wrote:

Ubuntu live works very slow and only 105 of hardware is supported.

 

the only think i can suggest is to burn Hiren's boot CD to an USB and see if you are able to make recovery partition bootable or clone that partition to your PC and try to create a bootable USB pen, probably you will need to wipe all the SSD to make recovery installation working.

---

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll try it as soon as I can