Reading up on this thread I've seen that there are several ways to restore my acer laptop. I have no cd revoery as it never came with one so I tried the ALT+10 way..
Unfortunately what I get is hardly as system wipe instead i'm greeted with the following:
EDIT windows boot options for Microsoft windows vista
path :\windows\system32\winload.exe
partition:2
Harddisk: b04bbbe6
[/NOEXECUGTE=OPTIN
I tried hitting enter, and it just reboots the computer, I tried putting 6 zeros as a password just reboots. Hel please i want factory settings for this thing. Everything's failing over the past 3 months. Now i can't even open control panel and sometimes even My Computer or other programs without it failing.
I've also have problems running any application and instaling anything. I'm trying to install/reinstall the acer recovery thing but it is stuck at like 99% of the "Preparing Install Shield" I can't seem to find the "Hidden" partition, and can't seem to access "MY COMPUTER" i have been using the web browser(onlything that seems to work) to manually type in path's in the address bar, I am 90% sure this is a virus.
Here is my hijackthis file :
Logfile of Trend Micro HijackThis v2.0.2
Scan saved at 11:48:54 PM, on 9/11/2009
Platform: Windows Vista SP1 (WinNT 6.00.1905)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v7.00 (7.00.6001.18000)
Boot mode: Normal
something just happened, I went to properties on taskbar, then clicked toolbars>new and clicked Computer then I saw I drive! It is my hidden partition drive! but then i right clicked it (idk why) and my computer froze, now i restarted and tried again and... i don't see the I drive
I finally got it through Linux, I was able after much trouble shooting to get the cd rom working a little bit(still crashed a bunch)then i downloaded iso of LiveCd for Linux (Ubuntu) and booted up to that, but the cd didn't work.
When booting the computer I went and pressed f2 to get into bios, at first I couldn't figure out which drive was the cd-rom as there were 5 extra ones, so i went back onto desktop deleted them then back to f2 and set CD-Rom to boot first. Never using ubuntu I had trouble with the interface but finally was able to figure it out.
At the Ubuntu main screen i went to the terminal (their version of dos)
by going Applications*uptop*>> accessories> terminal.
After messing around here for a bit i read what another member ScottW on the HowToGeek forum stated :
cd /mnt
sudo mkdir acer
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/acer
cd acer
cat aimdrs.dat
and viola my password popped outta no where and I am not going to go reboot and try to get into the partition so I can restore to factory settings!