Situation: I had a nasty virus attack and now I can't reload my original software from my recovery disks. Detail: After the virus attack I used the recovery disks to reformat and set C: drive back to factory default settings. I have two recovery disks that I was instructed to burn when I first bought and turned on the machine. It seemed the virus survived the reformat from the recovery disk. I then decided to use DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke to completely wipe the HDD and start over using the recovery disks. So DBAN completely wiped the HDD, filled it with 0's. Erased all partitions and the master boot record along with everything else. When I tried to reload the original software from the recovery disks I get two error messages. "Fail Cannot Find Volume Information" and, "Recovery 32: Cannot find preload.tag for setboot.ini" From extensive google searches I have found out that the recovery disks I created are dependent on the original master boot record remaining intact, mine is gone, hence the missing preload.tag. Not to mention the partitioning on the HDD is not there as expected by the recovery disk. So from further searches I'm finding out that I need to recreate the partitions on the HDD to original specs and somehow restore the original MBR. Additionally, there was a hidden partition that contained a recovery image (like 3gb's large) that was used for a D2D (disk to disk) recovery utility that can be performed from within the windows environment pressing alt+f10 or something. I want to restore that also if I can. Advantage: I bought an Acer Aspire 3690 for my mother identical to mine just like two weeks before I bought mine. Complete with identical software loaded on it. I can use her machine to copy any images I need to transplant to mine. I have downloaded and burned the UBCD (ultimate boot CD) as suggested in other forums. It has many apps and utilities on it. I'm not exactly sure how to use it. I see one app on it called Ranish Partition Manager that looks like what I need to get the job done. Is anyone out there familiar with the UBCD and this Partition Manager? Thus far, this is what I know I need to do. Boot the UBCD on my mother's Acer to see exactly how her HDD is partitioned and sized in each partition. I think there are three on the 3690, C:, D: and a hidden partition for the D2D thing. I then need to duplicate this partiitoning back on my HDD (although I'm not exactly sure how to accomplish it). I then need to copy the contents of her hidden partition, some kind of recovery image, and then transplant it to my hidden partition. Then lastly, I either need to copy her entire MBR to mine HDD or just the part the recovery disks are looking for. Does anyone have any suggestions or instructions? I would be indebted to you greatly. Thanks!
Does that boot disk have Partition Magic on it ? You can use Partition Magic do most everything you need to do, BUT it will be too much work to do in my opinion.. I would just get an XP setup disk and use that..Does it have XP or Vista ?
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