Acer System Restore Functionality

Many PC vendors today appear to eschew providing installation or restore discs, instead opting for hidden partitions on the system's hard drive to contain the factory default image and restore utility. This has the advantage that you can restore your system without needing to locate any installation media, however, it can cause a bit of a problem if the restore partition is corrupt, missing or you're unable to boot into it!

I was recently rebuilding two Acer laptops; an Aspire 1360 and an Aspire 3690. While backing up user data from both machines, I noticed the existence of restore partitions. After some research, I discovered that the way to access the restore system was to press alt+F10 when booting the system.

The restore functionality for the Aspire 1360 worked without any issue; the machine booted into a pre-configured Norton Ghost instance. I was asked for my confirmation before overwriting the operating system partition with the stock Windows XP image.

However, when I attempted to access the restore partition on the Aspire 3690, I could only access a boot loader screen that offered me the choice of booting either the installed Vista Home Basic instance, or a memory checking utility. After trawling some forums, it appeared that other people have experienced similar issues; usually after re-installing the OS from a standard Windows install CD/DVD. This is because only the Acer supplied image contains the appropriate boot loader option to access the restore feature.

Fortunately, I had a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), which I used to manually select the partition to boot from. The UBCD is a very useful tool to have lying around; it contains a myriad of different utilities that can prove useful in the event of an emergency. Booting from the CD presents you with a ASCII-based menu system where you can access the various tools.

I used the Smart BootManager, which I accessed by navigating to File System Tools -> Boot Managers and selecting the relevant entry:

Once the Smart Boot Manager had loaded, it was possible to select the first partition on the hard disk (Primary 1) and boot into the recovery software.



Please note, the above image is not representative of the Acer Aspire 3690 partition scheme, just so it doesn't confuse anybody attempting to retrace my steps! It's simply a screen shot I took when running the utility on a test VM I have.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 DB Restore Issue

After a database backup that was taken from a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 instance was restored to a SQL Server 2005 instance, I experienced an issue where the name of the user that owned the database previously is prepended to all the table names. Check out the image below of the Object Explorer to see what I mean, it's a restored Confluence database; as you can see, "nconfluenceuser" is part of the table names. Usually, this would be "dbo" (DataBase Owner).



This caused an problem for the Confluence instance that attempted to use the database, because none of the queries performed against the database worked - they all failed with an "table does not exist" error.

To get around this issue, I performed the following steps:

1. Created a new database in the Object Explorer.


2. Right-clicked the DB, selected "Tasks", then "Import Data..." - this presented me with the Import and Export wizard.


3. As I was presented with the wizard's welcome screen, I had to hit "Next" to progress to the "Choose a Data Source" screen. Here you select the data source, server and database to import from. As my restored database was on the local machine, the "Data Source" and "Server Name" fields already had appropriate values; all I had to do was select the database from the drop-down list marked "Database".


4. Hitting "Next" took me to the "Destination" screen, which was already filled out correctly, because of how I kicked-off the wizard (via the destination database's context menu).


5. For the next step in the Wizard, I chose the default selection of "Copy data from one or more tables or views" before clicking "Next".


6. Now for the important bit; the "Select Source Tables and Views" step. Here I had to click the "Select All" button, then edit the "Destination" fields for all the tables; removing all the text prior to the table name. After moving down to the next table, the wizard ensured that the edited destination was correctly formatted. See the below pic for an example:
   
   These were the only modification I made in this step, I didn't change any of the other options present


7. I clicked "Next" a couple more times, which allowed me to review the pending transactions, before I clicked "Finish" to finally perform the import; this could take some time, depending on the size of the DB to import and the speed of the machine.


8. After it had finished and I closed the wizard, I was able to see that the newly created DB no longer had the "nconfluence" username prepended to it, but "dbo"; see the below picture.
   


9. My final step was to create a user for Confluence to bind to the database as, granting the account "dbo" privileges over the imported DB.