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

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!

Disk_Management.png

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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.

Recovery_Drive.png

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.