xp recovery

too cut a long story short I messed up my registry on my xp aa1. Its all fixed now but i had to do a full install from a xp recovery disk i made from this forum which worked fine.I did not have a repair over the top option however. It was basically a system files missing problem and i could not repair it via the recovery console and could not access the recovery partition using alt F10 but this did not work. this is an original xp machine and i had not altered anything to effect this to my knowledge. so i wonder what the point of wasting this partition area for a useless recovery partition? anyone know how the recovery partition works correctly? or for that matter how the e-recovery prog works?

thanks james

 

i suppose what im atually saying is when i needed it the recovery did not work, anyone else with a factory xp system tested theres?? im on bios 3309 but would be interested to hear about anyone getting it to work. anyone care to try to see if they can access it (obviously just open it and not do it unnecessarily)

james

 

have found a link to the D2D start function in the MBR becoming switched off (possibly due to the 3309 bios update) D2D is switched on in the bios, and the PQService partition is intact (never been touched) found a link on how to repair it but that is not without its risks so i'm thinking about not bothering because i am lookin at a full back up option (if needed just restore from my recovery cd like i just did then restore my files and programmes and settings from a back up file) as the D2D will only give me back the original settings which is only what the recover cd gives me anyway. The few extra updates and files can then be downloaded direct from acer. I am now planning to do this full back up then i can recover the 5gb or so space from the obsolete partition (which i too scared to try to fix) just sharing this in the event that it might assist someone else.

James