How do I get my recovery partition to boot on my Aspire 7741G.

Luigi1
Luigi1 Member Posts: 3 New User

I have an acer 7741G with a damaged windows boot sequence. I tried to shrink the normal Windows volume with AOMEI partition assistant. IT went through all the actions and booted its WPE system, but a way through the operation, iit stopped with a message to sorry it cannot continue because of a hard disk error.

Now it cannot boot up to Windows. It has Windows 7 home-premium installed.

I have treid just about all advice on the web, including BCDEDIT. BOOTREC CHKDSK and none seem to make a difference.

There is no errormessage but when stated, I see the coloured windows logo for WHILE, then the screen goes blank, the wifi light comes on, and then after a few seconds of much disk activity, it goes into a once a second disk access.

I really would like to recover the existing windows system.

The recover and pqservice partitions are seen by the diskpart utiliy when run.

I attache two cell phone pictures of the diskpart screens.

Please advise if there is an easy way to recover my windows disk without a full re-install.

MAny thanks


Answers

  • JackE
    JackE ACE Posts: 44,873 Trailblazer

    >>>I tried to shrink the normal Windows volume with AOMEI partition assistant.>>>

    The recommended way to shrink partitions to make room for Linux is using Control Panel's disk manager to avoid corrupting the recovery partition which often happens with 3rd party disk management tools.

    If the hidden Acer OEM factory recovery partition hasn't been corrupted, you might be able to reset Win7 while saving your personal files by following these instructions

    1. Press and hold power button till system shuts off
    2. Turn laptop back on and immediately tap F2 to enter the BIOS menu
    3. Make sure the F12 and D2D options are both enabled int the BIOS MAIN tabl
    4. Press F10 to save BIOS settings and exit
    5. Press and hold power button again till system shuts off
    6. Turn laptop back on and immediately press and hold the ALT key while tapping the F10 key
    7. A recovery screen should appear to allow you to reset the system while saving your personal files if the recovery hidden recovery partition hasn't been damaged.

    If this doesn't work, you might still be able to order the OEM factory recovery USB for about $40 from the Acer store in the US or Canada. Or you can re-install a generic Microsoft Win7 version using Microsoft's USB media creation tool.

    acerWinISO

    Jack E/NJ

  • Luigi1
    Luigi1 Member Posts: 3 New User

    Thanks for the info. Just as I suspected, I cannot recover the original working windows system.

    I find that very disturbing that no one seems to know how to recover this condition. The disc was good and I saw all the files on the disk.

    Anyhow, I thought you might like to know and in favor of any other readers of this message, that even as you and others said to get into the recovery boot, you must hold the ALT key and press F10 repeatedly. Well this only worked by getting into the boot options, but only had a simple parameter as "/NOEXECUTE" in the line. I discuvered by shear desperation of trying things that you MUST press ALT and F10 repeatedly together for it to work properly. This means pressing ALT and F10 then letting both go togethet, then repeatedly do this. When this is done, the same boot meny options screen comes up, BUT it now has the proper list of parameters preset in the line, and they made sense to me.

    Pressing enter at this stagesimple did the recovery partition boot operation.

  • JackE
    JackE ACE Posts: 44,873 Trailblazer

    >>>>I cannot recover the original working windows system.>>>

    >>>Pressing enter at this stage simple did the recovery partition boot operation.>>>


    ???? These two sentences seem to contradict. Did the recovery work? Or did the recovery not work?

    Jack E/NJ

  • Luigi1
    Luigi1 Member Posts: 3 New User

    The recovery partition booted and worked as expected.

    But as I mentioned I wanted all software to be functional and still installed, but this could not happen.

    And of course the recovery "system" installed some VERY OLD software which I now have to manually get rid of and now need to do much configuring of the new system.

  • JackE
    JackE ACE Posts: 44,873 Trailblazer

    Yes, that is all the Acer OEM Win7 factory recovery process can do. It is impossible to do any more than that. Since Microsoft no longer supports or updates Win7, the system will run Win7 just like the day you first turned on the machine many years ago. It will no longer receive Microsoft Win7 updates since that service ended in Jan 2020 nearly 3 years ago.

    You have two options. You can probably install the most recent 2019 generic Win7 iso version from archive org and fix any driver issues with Acer downloads or DriverBooster freeware tools. Or you can try to install Win10 and try to set it up to look and act like Win7. With Win10 you should continue to get updates.

    Sorry that you seem to have expected a more recent Win7 system from a hidden factory recovery partition on a hard drive that is at least 10 years old. The only way that would've been possible is if you had created a backup image on a USB just before the damage happened.😥

    Jack E/NJ