Acer D2D factory settings without mbrwrdos.exe

jamieh

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2008
3
0
18,510
I have an Acer Aspire 5633WLMI Notebook which came with the XP system.
I upgraded to Vista but now want to restore the notebook to factory settings.
It would appear that by upgrading to Vista,the Acer MBR record was overwritten and that to recreate the record I need to utilise 2 files in the hidden partition : rtmbr.bin and mbrwrdos.exe.
I have a file named mbrwrWin.exe in the hidden partition but mot mbrwrdos.exe.
Can I achieve the same result from mbrwrWin.exe or do I need to somehow acquire the mbrwrdos.exe file from someone?
 

RandallP

Distinguished
Dec 8, 2009
1
0
18,510
It appears no one has answered this question. I see no replies nor any connected threads. So for the sake of others that have this same question, yes, mbrwrwin.exe will work in the same way as mbrwrdos.exe to restore the Acer MBR so that Alt+F10 will work.

I was working on an AcerPower S285 system that had the Acer MBR overwritten by an XP install CD. After unhiding the restore partition, I found I had mbrwrwin.exe and rtmbr.bin in the recover partition but not mbrwrdos.exe. I had nothing to lose since I have the full restore CD set. So I wanted to see if it works like mbrwrdos.exe, and it does indeed work. I can now access the restore utility and the hidden restore partition by pressing Alt+F10 at the Acer bootup screen.

For a more thorough treatment of this procedure, see http://www.roundtripsolutions.com/blog/2007/10/18/300/acer-disk-to-disk-d2d-recovery-broken/

In the above article it mentions disabling D2D in the BIOS before you do anything else. My AcerPower S285 had no option to disable D2D. So I proceeded on the assumption this would not be a problem. I proceeded to do the mbr restore, which, as I said, was successful.