Recovery W510 using a USB drive

ghoblo
ghoblo Member Posts: 1 New User

Hi,

 

I have a W510 and would like to to a total recovery.

I bought an external DVD-drive (samsung), but the W510 refuses to boot from the dvd drive (I have tried with the System DVD and the two Recovery DVD's).

 

I have tried copying the three DVD's on to a USB-drive (along with the Danish language pack).

 

This boots fine and it starts copying the files but halts at 99%, when it asks for the Recovery Disk 2 in the optical drive.

The Recovery Disk 2 is already on the USB (otherwiese ot wouldn't get as far as 99%, tried it with out it, but then it halted at around 60%).

 

I have tried connecting the external DVD drive with Recovery Disk 2 in it, but it still won't recognize the DVD-drive.

 

So now I can't boot in to Windows (as it has already started the recovery and I can't do a complete recovery as it want the Recovery Disk 2 in the DVD drive (despite I booted from the USB).

 

What can I do now?

Answers

  • padgett
    padgett ACE Posts: 4,532 Pathfinder

    Most likely the W510 USB does not have enough power for the DVD drive, they take 1-1.5A to spin up.

     

    I had to add a powered hub with its own power supply for my DVD drive to be reliablea GearHead UH7250MAC Seven Port powered hub that is "for Mac" so is white but works fine. (I have a lot of "stuff" around here).

     

     It is possible that your DVD has a 5v power imput I am just testing so many things (EZCap, GPS, DVD, Keyboard, Mouse) that a powered hub was best for me.

     

    BTW The only disk of the three that is bootable is the System DVD in the seperate pack.

     

    Now why can't I boot an Ubuntu live drive is the question. Looking at the Clover Trail specs I am wondering if the inability to boot anything other than Windows 8 is deliberate.

  • Alchemist42
    Alchemist42 Member Posts: 10 New User

    I have been unable to boot the recovery media either.   

     

    I have a w510-1620 unit, 32gb no recovery partition, no keyboard dock.  It came with 4 disks of recovery media (system, disk1, disk2, english language pack).  

     

    I have a sansung external dvd, that works fine for reading disks once the system is booted, but when its plugged into the device it is ignored during boot.

     

    I have gone through the bios... added admin password, disabled secure boot, changed boot order to dvd then usb then internal drive,  turned on the F12 boot menu (althouh ive never seen it). and it still ignores the drive during boot.  

     

    Created a USB ntfs disk and copied the system disk contents to it.   When this usb is in the drive during boot it freezes and does nothing...  once the usb is disconnected i will boot in a couple minutes to the internal drive.

     

    Used an external hub... plugged the drive into the hub so its pre-powered and spun up before starting the computer.  plug the hub into the w510 and boot... it hands like with the USB...  continues that way until you unplug the hub then it will startup in a minute or two on the internal drive. 

     

    I've talked to acer 3 times now.  Twice in chat (who are reading from a script and no clue) and once on the phone to a supposedly level 2 tech.   He finally suggested I call microsoft.  Told he to use Power+Windows+Volume Up to get to a boot menu but Its never worked.   I told him if I can't get this going ill be returning it, he said i should give them a chance to solve it first... thought thats what I was doing then.  lol. 

     

    In any case, ive read that the boot media needs to be UEFI compliant and UEFI only supports win32 so im making another boot disk in win32 format to see if i can get it to boot.  Just wanted to chime in that your not alone and I'm having the same problems as you.  Although you could boot from USB I havent... likely due to usb being NTFS, we will see.

  • micaud
    micaud Member Posts: 5 New User

    You need to use Fat32 for recovery, ntfs not working.

    Acer Recovery Management makes usb disk recovery using Fat32 and it works, but in Ntfs it's not working i don't know why, same for dvd disk.

  • Junonia
    Junonia Member Posts: 8 New User

    Wow, a lot of people hijacking posts on this forum. I'll try to answer the original question posted. Make sure all your recovery media is on the same USB. Go into the Recovery disk 1 files and find the folder called RCD.dat. Open it with a text editor and change PCS = 2 to PCS =1. 

     

    Now, a problem that I have is that while it fixes YOUR problem, my tablet prompts me for the system disk at the very end of recovery. Haven't figured out what to do with this yet.

  • jchadbourne
    jchadbourne Member Posts: 1 New User

    Any luck solving your last reported problem regarding prompting for system disc during restore?  Thanks

This discussion has been closed.