How to extract original drivers from recovery partition on Acer

gggirlgeek

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Hi,

Does anyone know how to extrat the original drivers from the recovery partition on an Acer One netbook and save them?

I want to re-partition an Aspire one D260 and install Win7 Ultimate retail. (I have other backup methods.)

However, from what I've read, some of the drivers on Acer's website, particularly the graphics driver, don't work well. It would also be nice to save them for future use.

I can unhide and assign a letter to the recovery partition with third party tools. Where do I look for the drivers, especially the Radeon graphics driver?
 

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums.

I think you will both find that Windows 7 will identify and set the drivers for such a common model of laptop. Anything that doesn't work can be fixed afterwards - W7 will almost certainly find an ethernet driver to get you online to sort the others out if necessary.

Recovery Partition material is usually so deeply compressed, I doubt you'd get anything off it. However, using it to revert to factory settings after you move your personal data to a safe place will give you a safe platform on which to base a Windows 7 upgrade, which could also save you money.


 

gggirlgeek

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Thanks for the reply but I am looking for a specific driver (the ATI Radeon driver) that doesn't seem to work for other people who have tried downloading it off of Acer's website. It is proprietary so it's not on ATI's site either. According to the posts I read there is a way to pull it out of the recovery partition. They said Winzip or 7zip should do the trick.

I want the other drivers mainly for safe keeping.

Reverting back to Acer's Win7 Starter is not an option at this point for several reasons. No need to get into it all here.

This has actually become urgent now because the netbook is in a BSOD loop. I want the drivers before I reformat (with my UltimateBoot4Win USB stick.) I will try on my own while waiting for an answer here.
 

gggirlgeek

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Oops! Brain fart. (It is 6am after all.)

It is not an ATI graphics card I needed drivers for. I have a bunch of PC's running at the moment. :??:

It is the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 (Acer's proprietary version.)
 


Whatever it is, it wil have a unique reference in Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager and scroll to the device, then right click it, go to Properties and then click the Details tab. Scroll to HardwareIDs and take a note of the four characters which follow VEN for Vendor and also the four following DEV for Device.

Go to http://www.pcidatabase.com and input those characters in the two relevant boxes and follow the trail to the right driver. When you find the list of the Vendor's drivers, they aren't ino order so use your browser's Find facility to track the Device details. With luck you'll have an executable file but some will be a zipped folder.

I might play around with unzipping a recovery set later (it's 06:30 here) but I'd be interested to know if you can get into it.