Factory Reset Aspire V3-471-6867, no Recovery Management Installed, Alt+F10 not working

Luis_Nuño

Hello!

 

I'm trying to factory reset my brother in law's Acer Aspire V3-471-6867, but when I press Alt+F10 at boot time the Recovery tool does not start.

On Windows there is no Acer Recovery Management installed.

 

When I go to Computer Management -> Disk Management I see the next 4 partitions:

• Recovery                               400 MB             NTFS
• ESP                                       300 MB             FAT32
• Acer (C: )                              682.83 GB        NTFS
• No named EFI Partition          15 GB

 

Using a third party partitioning tool I managed to mount the Recovery, ESP and EFI partitions and they look OK, they contain the information for booting and resetting the system.

 

I booted from GParted Live CD and made those partitions bootable (one at the time) and restarted the PC, but I was never able to boot from any partition other than Acer (C: ), all the times the current Windows 8 already installed started, ignoring the boot partition changes.

 

I have been looking for information about how to factory reset this laptop, I have tried several methods I have found but the result is always the same, the current Windows 8 keeps booting.

 

I wonder if there is any way to manually start the system restore application.

 

Any help will be really appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

IronFly

have you tried to create a recovery media?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-usb-recovery-drive

 

by the way the Acer recovery parition, normally is the 15GB hidden partition; please notice that your system is under UEFI settings and you can't just mark a partition as bootable to let it boot, it will override by windows boot manager.

 

Luis_Nuño

The "Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive" checkbox is grayed out.

 

 

As per the instructions the recovery drive will include only the recovery tools and bootable image, but not the recovery image for refresing or reseting the PC.

IronFly

ok, let's try a few things:

 

open a command prompt (admin)

diskpart
select disk 0

list partition
select partition x (x is the number of the 15GB hidden partition)
assign letter=R
exit

reboot your system

 

now the 15GB partition must be visible, check if it's empty or have some files inside; if you see recovery files inside, try:

open a command prompt (admin)
reagentc.exe /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\windows

exit

Reboot

Try to create a recovery disk to see if it works

Luis_Nuño

I was unable to create the recovery drive, all the times I tried to create it the checkbox was grayed out.

 

What I did was to re-set the partition IDs and after that the Alt+F10 worked and allowed me to factory reset the laptop, BUT... now I have a new issue.

 

Once the factory reset process finished windows is not booting anymore, now I get a message saying:

 

No Bootable Device, Hit any key.

[OK]

 

The partitions and all the info is there, but for any reason Windows is not starting.

 

I burned a Windows 8 installation DVD, booted from the DVD and tried to repair the installation but it is not working, the "No Bootable Device, Hit any key." is always displayed.

 

Is there any way to fix the booting options?

IronFly

BIOS is set on UEFI or Legacy?

 

from the windows 8 DVD, enter command prompt (press shift+F10 at language screen)

type

diskpart

list disk

select disk x (x is the number of your HDD)

list partition

 

report the partition list

 

 

Luis_Nuño

BIOS is set to UEFI, actually I have loaded the defaults.

 

DISKPART> list partition

 

Partition ###    Type                 Size               Ofsset

----------------   -----------------   -------------    -----------------

Partition 1        Recovery           400 MB          1024 KB

Partition 2        Primary             300 MB           401 MB

Partition 3        Reserved           128 MB           701 MB

Partition 4        Primary             682 GB           829 MB

Partition 5        System                15 GB           683 MB

IronFly

Try to switch to Legacy and check if it boots.

 

at least, if you don't need to recovery any personal data, i can suggest you to set BIOS to UEFI and do a clean windows 10 installation.

Luis_Nuño

I have tried chanching to legacy too but Windows is not booting either, so I guess the only option is to do a clean Windows 10 Installation...

IronFly

I suppose too.

 

Probably something messed up the EFI partition.