G9-793 - Restore disk?

Arrhenius

I am about to wipe clean the Predator G9 I have. It has been more than a year since I moved to a larger drive; and now I have a ton of extra stuff that I really want to remove. Mostly it is old software and even uninstall is not removing everything; so I just want to wipe the drive clean and start with a fresh install.

Does Acer supply restore images for their laptop (I am old school, I remember restore dvd being included with the computer); or should I just wipe the drive by installing Windows 10 from scratch?

I don't really mind about anything that is coming with the laptop; the only useful thing is acer care, to see the serial info and such; but other than that there is nothing else I really care or use at all.

MaClane

Good evening Arrhenius !

Acer does not provide any OEM from the factory OEM system of your machine.
The system copy is stored in the hidden partition that can be activated by pressing ALT + F10 when the device is turned on.

xapim

Arrhenius Acer only provides system usb recovery drives if you live in the US they will not ship it internationally and its only available to purchase in the US and also not available for all models so if you dont live in the US i suggest you to backup everything you need and follow the instructions that MaClane provided above (if your recovery partition its still intact) and perform a fresh windows install not keeping any filesyou don not require any windows key for activation the oem home key its built into the bios itself will auto activate with any version of windows that you would install but if you wish to save the key first you can do so by retrieving it via command line

Arrhenius

MaClane said:

Good evening Arrhenius !

Acer does not provide any OEM from the factory OEM system of your machine.
The system copy is stored in the hidden partition that can be activated by pressing ALT + F10 when the device is turned on.

Thanks for the reply!

Sadly I do not have the recovery partition; the computer came with 2x128 GB M2 drives in RAID; and the first thing I did was to get a larger drive, so I replaced few weeks after the purchase, both drives with 2x 1TB M2 drives (sadly only one slot is nvme). When I cloned the drive from the original drive, I didn't clone the recovery partition.

I guess I have to wipe clean the drive then; no big deal

Arrhenius

xapim said:

Arrhenius Acer only provides system usb recovery drives if you live in the US they will not ship it internationally and its only available to purchase in the US and also not available for all models so if you dont live in the US i suggest you to backup everything you need and follow the instructions that MaClane provided above (if your recovery partition its still intact) and perform a fresh windows install not keeping any filesyou don not require any windows key for activation the oem home key its built into the bios itself will auto activate with any version of windows that you would install but if you wish to save the key first you can do so by retrieving it via command line

Got it; I am still at the time when computers would have images on a Blu-ray disk I don't really have much personal data on the drive; I always save everything on external drives; so the only thing on the drive is the applications basically; which I can loose since I will install them again from scratch.

The nice thing about W10 is that you don't need a key to activate it again; that was the best feature they implemented Thanks!

xapim

Arrhenius said:

MaClane said:

Good evening Arrhenius !

Acer does not provide any OEM from the factory OEM system of your machine.
The system copy is stored in the hidden partition that can be activated by pressing ALT + F10 when the device is turned on.

Thanks for the reply!

Sadly I do not have the recovery partition; the computer came with 2x128 GB M2 drives in RAID; and the first thing I did was to get a larger drive, so I replaced few weeks after the purchase, both drives with 2x 1TB M2 drives (sadly only one slot is nvme). When I cloned the drive from the original drive, I didn't clone the recovery partition.

I guess I have to wipe clean the drive then; no big deal

Arrhenius

 <<<When I cloned the drive from the original drive, I didn't clone the recovery partition>>>

It should had cloned everything including the recovery partition if it didnt that means it wasnt cloned properly somehow, which software did you used to clone it i always used easeus partiton master on every drive never had any issues for years your best solution now its to download a windows 10 image and burn it into a usb drive using rufus (GPT mode) setup a bios supervisor password disable secure mode and enable boot menu for you to be able to boot it from the usb drive in order to install you can also use a usb dvd/r/rw also works i have one (im also still old school i guess) and tried it it will boot up but the usb drive its less hassle for everyone  

Arrhenius

Hmm, I forgot what I used; it was a software downloaded from internet, that was referenced in a tutorial about cloning drives. I think it was Macrium maybe?

Anyway I did copy only the boot partition and the main windows partition probably; because on the current drive I just see those 2 partitions (and the 120 mb partition that windows create on its own during install); nothing else.

Not a problem in the end; I can get the whole wipe and re-install of Windows in about 1h, but will take me few hours to install again all the software. The most time consuming part will be to retrieve serial numbers; I just love applications that tie your licenses to your account, so once you log in, you get them authorized

sri369

1. Copy all necessary data to an external disk.
2. Uninstall all programs you think are not needed.
3. Install something like tune up utilities that would help defrag the registry and delete/fix broken entries.
4. Create a new user (this would help create a new profile for the new user with no remnant data of your old user profile).
5. Log in into this new user and once happy, delete the old user, including profile.

This process goes a long way and doesn't need you reinstalling Windows again.

Also, you mentioned about wanting to wipe windows after just about an year - keeping windows tuned with steps 2 and 3 above will let you keep windows fresh for many years.

Example, see the screenshot of cleaning windows below (I normally run this about once a month or so) (SSDs are not defragmented).