Disclaimer: First of all, backup your system before launching it in any dangerous operation, some of the operations to come may cause data loss. Any modification and/or damage to your laptop will be your responsibility.

As you know, Acer and non-Acer laptops now ship with a system restore installed on a hidden partition (PQ service for Acer) on your hard drive. Normally this system is launched by simultaneously pressing the ALT+F10 keys, but sometimes that doesn’t work.

What is the problem?

There are many possible causes, but the most common are:

HAS The D2D function was disabled in the bios.

Solution: Enable the feature by pressing F2 during boot to access the BIOS menu and change settings, then reboot and press ALT+F10 keys during laptop startup.

Note: For all of the following solutions please note Max’s advice, I am now quoting Max, a contributor on my site “But I want to mention how I solved the problem, because it is rarely mentioned on the web. All methods to fix D2D Alt+f10 problem are expert and clever, but they all forget to say something fundamental:
first of all you have to rebuild with a soft partition the empty partition D:Acerdata FAT32 that almost everyone deletes because it is usually empty. Just doing it, everything went well and the recovery worked like a charm.”

Yes, many restore attempts fail due to this condition.

B. Another common problem is that Acer Master Boot Record (MBR) is corrupted or replaced by the MBR of another system. You can reinstall Acer MBR if the PQservice partition is present or if you can access the necessary files.

Solutions:

FIRST

On a working FAT32 Windows system the partition table values ​​are OC or OB for the installable FAT32 system files and 12 or 1B for the hidden FAT32 partition, for an NTFS system the known partition table values ​​are O7 for the installable NTFS file system and 27 for the Acer custom hidden NTFS partition:

1. Go to BIOS and disable the D2D recovery option.

2. Download partedit32.

3. Identify the PQservice partition by its size (there is an information box at the bottom of the part editing window) it is the small size partition about 4-9 GB. Once done, change the type of your partition to 0C (FAT32) or 07 (NTFS) and save. Reboot and you should now be able to navigate inside the PQservice partition.

Look for these two files:

mbrwrdos.exe

rtmbr.bin

(The name of these two files may be different sometimes)

When located, open a command prompt window as administrator and enter this command “mbrwrdos.exe install rtmbr.bin”, to install Acer MBR. Close command prompt, reboot your laptop again, re-enable D2D recovery in BIOS. Now ALT+F10 should work and run Acer Recovery when the laptop boots.

SECOND

Someone who tried the first method but failed to find the 2 files found another solution to restore the partition.

Use parteedit32 to locate the pqservice partition (on aspire 5920g, it is the largest partition 9gb)

Change partition type to 07 (NTFS installable), reboot.

After reboot, go to Windows computer management and mark the PQservice partition as active and then reboot again.

Clever!! Now you can continue on the road to recovery.

THIRD

We have a non-functional Windows system.

Download the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), run it, and choose from the menu:

-File system tools

-Boot Managers

-Form JAW worked fine, but you can choose any of the other bootloaders, it will recognize the PQ service by its (hidden) type.

Simply install any bootloader and use it to start the PQ service to start the Erecovery restore process.

against The latest problem: you replaced your hard drive (in this case, PQservice is no longer present) or your partition was deleted or damaged.

Solution: I hope you burned the Acer Restore CD/DVD when prompted at the time of first use, because if you didn’t previously back up your laptop by making a disk image, it won’t be possible to use Acer Recovery. .

Let’s give the last words to Max:

“Problem solved Alan. And you are right that an external drive for data backup is very important. Yes, I have it and I backed up my data before I started messing it up…”