Acer Recovery - FAIL to get partition 1 drive letter

[hypnotic_monkey]

I have Vista Home Premium on an acer 93series notebook.
All of a sudden it stopped booting up (just went to a black screen after the boot screen and before the logon screen) and acer startup recovery console said there was no problem with the startup.

I booted into Mandriva (linux) to get to my files and transfer them, and now when i select to start windows it goes into acer recovery and come up with "FAIL to get partition 1 drive letter". i can still access all partitions through linux.

The partitions are:
Acer Recovery (Hidden)
Windows (Was C: )
Data (Was D: )
Linux (OS)
Linux (Swap)

How can i get the drive letter back (assuming it means C: as it still boots into the recovery console) and it just comes up with a lil box with the message and when i click ok it restarts - so cant access CMD or DISKPART.EXE....

cheers.

[hypnotic_monkey]

Forgot to mention i had installed updates before vista stopped working - shut it down and the next day is when it stopped booting.

[cyclic]

Which is your default boot system ?

[hypnotic_monkey]

i swapped to linux grub boot as i was getting annoyed that it wouldnt boot into vista.

[hypnotic_monkey]

ok iv got the grub loader to start booting windows again, now im just left with the black screen after the vista loading screen!

[Trooper]

Will it boot in safemode?

[hypnotic_monkey]

yeh it will, but not if i choose with networking.

[Trooper]

Interesting. Have you tried disabling your network adaptor from the device manager while in safemode then and rebooting in normal mode?

I doubt that will make a difference though because the internet/network is working ok when you boot Linux right?

[AB_Tech]

Hey There,

Having ran into this problem twice, so I thought I would post the solution I had to use...at the very least so it would be easier to find the next time I needed to google it. So here was my situation, failed hard-drive, ghosted the recovery partition to a new harddrive, started getting the 'FAIL to get partition 1 drive letter' on the new hard drive, so I took the harddrive out plugged it into my desktop, created two partitions (same as what was in the factory), one ACER, one DATA partition, formatted them, NTFS, then I made the ACER one Active. After I put the HD back in the notebook I received a MBR error (when it was trying to boot off the ACER partition), shut it off again, turned it back on and pressed ALT-F10 to start the recovery routine, and it worked perfectly. Hope this helps someone!