Trying to fix recovery partition PQSERVICE

[LouArnold]

On an ACER laptop, I know that ALT-F10 is supposed to present a selection for recovery to a factory image. That's not working but I think I am close. So I have some technical questions:

What does ALT-F10 do? What "listens" to and first "catches" ALT-F10 - is it software or hardware? What software in the PQSERVICE partition gets control upon ALT-F10?

[GZ]

Hello louarnald,

Most recovery partitions (that I know of) are booted from the master boot record. I have seen loss of functionality when people upgraded their systems and/or changed their partition tables. HP is this way for sure. I am not positive with Acer, but I have had limited success with using Ubuntu live CDs to mark the service partition as "boot" (using GParted) and performing the system recovery.

Oh... Also, make sure D2D recovery is enabled in the BIOS.

[LouArnold]

Originally Posted by gavinzach

Hello louarnald,

Most recovery partitions (that I know of) are booted from the master boot record. I have seen loss of functionality when people upgraded their systems and/or changed their partition tables. HP is this way for sure. I am not positive with Acer, but I have had limited success with using Ubuntu live CDs to mark the service partition as "boot" (using GParted) and performing the system recovery.

Oh... Also, make sure D2D recovery is enabled in the BIOS.

I enabled D2D recovery in the BIOS, some time back.
As for booting, I have some success:
1) Vista in Partition 2 boots normally.
2) When I used ALT-F10 at boot time, the error message "NTLDR is missing" comes up thereafter on each boot. This means that something expects to find a loader. GParted clearly shows that then partition 1 is flagged as the boot partition.

But how does the computer get to that error message? and what in partition 1 is it looking for in particular?