Tag Archives: restore

General/Misc

Acer D2D erecovery corrupt

At a client location, I had to reimage an old Acer desktop computer. Installing it traditionally using the CD would have taken hours and then finding and installing the drivers. ALT+F10 usually works on Acers for factory restore but was not working on this computer. I checked in the disk management and the recovery partition was there. Using Hiren’s Boot Disc, I was able to mount the partition and see the files in it. Then the question was how to use it to restore, after a deep search on google, I followed these steps to make D2D work and do a factory restore:

  1. Confirm if the recovery partition is still there by going to Control panel > Administrator tools > Computer management > Disk management (Sometimes, a reinstallation or an attempt to do so may corrupt the partition)
  2. Once the partition is there, you can use any of those partition mounting tools available on the internet to mount the recovery partition and see if you are able to browse through the files and folders and also try to copy a file to your C drive to double confirm that the partition is okay and not only showing ghost files.
  3. If all looks good, browse the root of the recovery partition and you should be able to see these two files: mbrwrwin.exe & rtmbr.bin
  4. Now that all seems good, launch CMD and go to the drive letter of the mounted partition and type: mbrwrwin.exe install rtmbr.bin and hit enter. It will take some time and you will see some activity on the CMD window once finish, you can restart the computer and use the D2D recovery console.
  5. Immediately after you see the ACER logo on the screen, press and hold the ALT key on the keyboard and start tapping F10 until you see the Acer recovery wizard. You can follow the on screen prompts to recover your computer to the factory settings. One important thing to keep in mind is that it will delete everything on the C drive so you may keep your data on the D drive.

**This method has been tried and tested personally by me on 20 dec 2012 and found to be working. Before this, ALT + F10 was not working but worked on the first try afterwards.

Appassure, General/Misc

AppAssure 5 – Intro

Dell purchased Appassure early this year and came up with Dell AppAssure 5 as the latest version with a name change from Replay to Dell Appassure. The one thing which would make it a preferred choice among other products in the same category is “Live Recovery“.
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Live recovery empowers you to access the mission critical applications and data instantly while rest of the data is being recovered. What it means is, lets suppose somehow everything on your server or data store is lost. If you have had Appassure protection, you would be able to access all your data in minutes using this DR(Disaster recovery) solution. Now, you have access to 2 TB of data but it would take some time to copy it over to a new location since all the data is compressed and stored in its own patented container format. What if you need immediate access to your project files you were working on? Well, all you have to do is to start the recovery process and AppAssure will first show you the whole directory structure almost instantly and will start copying the actual data in the background. You can then navigate your way to the folder or the files you want and copy it to another location or launch it if its an executable file. AppAssure will recover that file/folder first and keep recovering the rest of the data in the background. You can very well imagine how useful this could prove to be in a situation like that.
I was so impressed with it that I registered myself on http://license.appassure.com and downloaded a trial to try my hands on it. I will add more articles regarding installation and implementation of AppAssure in coming days.

Image source: www.appassure.com