Accessing Laptop Hidden Partition

[Ed]

I have an Aspire 5100 with Vista Premium, pre-loaded on a hidden partition.
Can anyone tell me how to access this partition? I'm sure others would like
to know also, to repartition, save, remove files.
I'm considering going back to XP, just too many problems with Vista - for
example, the screen saver will not kick in, the CD/DVD driver gets lost, 1st
time I did a complete factory restore, 2nd time was able to do a Vista
restore backwards until I regained the driver. In other releases of Windows,
loosing the CD/DVD drivers was always able to recover by just rebooting the
computer.
Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[ray]

I have an Aspire 5100 with Vista Premium, pre-loaded on a hidden partition.
Can anyone tell me how to access this partition? I'm sure others would like
to know also, to repartition, save, remove files.
I'm considering going back to XP, just too many problems with Vista - for
example, the screen saver will not kick in, the CD/DVD driver gets lost, 1st
time I did a complete factory restore, 2nd time was able to do a Vista
restore backwards until I regained the driver. In other releases of Windows,
loosing the CD/DVD drivers was always able to recover by just rebooting the
computer.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Try a Linux Live CD - like Knoppix, Elive, or more simply the Gparted Live
CD.

 

[Kerry Brown]

What do you want to do with the partition? Normally you access it by
pressing a key on bootup. I think it's Alt-F10 with that model. Acers have
an option to turn this on/off in the BIOS. It has to be turned on to work.

 

[koze]

Or press F11 at boot to get the recovery options!
Ko.

 

[Ed]

Thanks for the replies, but I know how to use it, as a recovery/reinstall, I
want to be able to remove the files to disk/or external drive then I want
to delete these files, repartition the drive, so I can install XP.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Use the utility Acer supplied to make a set of recovery media. I have an
earlier model of the Acer 5100 that came with XP. I made two sets of
recovery media then removed all the partitions on the hard drive and
installed Vista. In order to do this you will need another copy of Vista as
Acers (and almost all other notebooks) don't come with installation media
but only a factory restore procedure. It is a problem with the way notebooks
and most large OEM desktops are configured. When I'm purchasing a notebook I
always factor the fact that I'll have to also purchase another copy of the
OS into my decision. It stinks but that's the way it works.

 

[NotMe]

With a bit of tweaking, I have been able to make a couple older machines
think the new files I copied into the recovery partition were the same as
the old ones, and system recovery from the HDD will install XP SP2 instead
of the original XP RTM.
I haven't tried it with Vista, but if you're killing the recovery partition
anyway, what could it hurt? LOL