Partitioned drive for xp/vista dual boot on emachines T3642. Now after reinstall I have absolutely no access to my recovery partition for reinstalling the preloaded software. The windows disk manager shows the data is still there but windows doesn't recognize it as a valid drive as it did before reinstall. I've tried to create a new drive letter using disk manager but the only option there is to delete the partition. How can I be able to reassign a drive letter to this for access again? This is a ''PC-Angel'' recovery system BTW. Windows shows it as ''Unknown Partition'' in boot manager but is still labeled as ''RECOVERY''
Thanks in advance!
The issue you are having involves using multiple systems,...If your emachine came with vistan and you installed xp, you voided your warranty status...However remove your dual boot and stick to vista if you wanna keep your restore partition working properly.....On a side note theres usually conflict with running OEM OS's on dual boot...typically it doesnt work and if it does it doesnt work like you want it to! so here is what you can do..Call Emachine up and fib to them a bit (just alittle) tell them that you cought a nasty bug and it messed with your restore partition and now you cant restore your pc....request the factory programing discs (if you ask nicely they'll hook you up 99.99% of the time) you get the discs so you can reprogram the pc to factory spec if you ever wanted to. Now use a retail version of vista and a retail version of xp. and create your dual boot, feel free to remove your restore partition if you want (cause you have the factory programing discs if you wanna go back to stock stuff YAY) I hope this helps!
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Can not find out partition folder
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Thanks so much for the insight! I'm really irritated at the fact that they design it that way. But I'm glad to know now because I'd planned on doing the same thing on my laptop, which really could have been a disaster because there aren't any discs whatsoever for reinstallation. It relies entirely on the restore partition for recovery which also annoys me. Anyhow I ended up reformatting and reinstalling vista back to factory and still couldn't see the restore partition. So I used acronis disk director, set it to active and managed to get it back to where I can see it and assign a drive letter. I was able to install the emachines recovery center via dos following their instructions. But now trying to use it it won't let me install anything. Where the option to click and reinstall the software is still there but not highlighted nor executable. Very aggravating! So I contacted emachines via email (just told them I couldn't access my recovery partition after crash) and they told me they couldn't help me unless I pay $60/30min since my warranty had expired. They did offer to sell me a restore disc for $20, but i'm not sure if it's the one I already have which is just a vista oem disc or something that includes the preinstalled software I'm needing. I couldn't find anywhere that says specifically and i'd rather not have to pay $60 to find out. Sooo I guess I'll just have to do without unless I can find out a way to get that !@#$ing recovery partition back to factory shape.
Thanks again for your help!
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