eo v7110: My restore option is gone

Recently a friend of mine mentioned me that after installing Vista in his eo v7110 the restore option in the boot screen disappeared. I checked my eo to find that my friend was right, during the boot, in the Bios screen a message appeared for a few seconds asking to press a hot key to run the restore application. And now that message was not there any more. With that confirmed my friend Angel decided to contact Amtek to find what keep should be pressed to launch the restoration application and to know why the message was not there any more. And here is the email he received from Amtek:

Dear Angel,

Good day. This is Jeff Chiu, I'm the RMA assistant manager in AMTEK. Thanks for purchasing our product.

About your question, My answer is as below:

The hot key location is on the right side of front panel, under the stick mouse. (Please see the attached for detail). Before you doing the restore action, please back up you important files from C: to D: first, Once the recover to be finished, The data in the C: will be totally destroyed. So that it is very important to back up your files before the restore.

Start to restore............
When you start the system, After BIOS logo appears. You will see "PRESS HOTKEY TO RUN RESTORE", then press the "hotkey" to run the restore program, and the system will be recovered from factory default setting.
PS! Before you start to restore, Please plug in AC adaptor with the restore action.

If you still got problem with your restore, Please feel free to contact me.

Best regards,
Jeff Chiu
Assistant Manager
Quality Assurance Dept.
AMtek System Co.,LTD

Ok, that answered what key to press to start the restoration process but why the message was not there any more? It seems that Vista overwrites during the installation the MBR or Master Boot Record and there is where that message is located. Of course, no only the message disappeared but the whole Restore Functionality. Pressing that hot key during the booting did not launch anything anymore.

But my friend. Angel does not give up that easy. He installed a freeware tool called Smart BootManager using this program which install it's own MBR, he boot into the restoration partition to find a menu with two options:

1- Windows PE (Windows PreInstallation Partition)
2- Windows

If the Second Option is selected Windows starts to finish a few seconds later with a file not found error.

If the first option is selected you end in another screen where the first option ask you if you want to restore your system. At this point my friend canceled the process because he wants to bad Vista in his unit for while. And here is a surprise. In the next boot the little message asking to press the hot key to restore the system was back! And the hot key was working again! Apparently by running the Windows PreInstallation Partition Option restores the original MBR!

So this is how my friend Angel found how to get this function back to work in his eo v7110.

If you want to read the original explanation written by my friend in Spanish you can do it here.