Asus System Recovery Error: “No partition selected”
This is a guide for anyone who receives the “No partition selected” error when trying to run a system recovery on their Asus Laptop.
The symptoms
- When you try to recover your OS you get the error: “No partition selected”
- You converted your partitions from FAT32 to NTFS (via the little short-cut Asus kindly put on your Desktop)
The cause
The software used to recover your OS only recognises FAT32 partitions. How wonderful of you PowerQuest. It’s no wonder I use Acronis for everything now…
The solution
You need to format your target partition to FAT32. There’s a nice Open-Source boot-cd that can do that. Or you can use Acronis Disk Director or something similar.
Did this help you at all? Any questions? Feel free to leave me a comment below

joel said,
18 January, 2008 at 10:47 pm
tenho 1 asus a7 j versao windows xp media center mas instalei o vista pa experimentar e agora nao consigo formatar o pc com os cds de recovery dele ke conteem o xp original dele kando seleciono o recovery na partiçao c: ele segue eu aceito os seguimentos mas cando vai começar a fazer o recovery aparece a dizer powerquest error eu ponho fix ele segue depois diz virus e nao avança mais
Phil Wiffen said,
21 January, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Joel, can you type this in English and I’ll try and help you out
JonathanNiels said,
18 April, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Thanks, I’m gonna try this. My situation is exactly als described by your post.
Tissinha said,
5 May, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I have that same error, but I can’t run Windows, so if I have to convert the partition to FAT32, I have to do it though ms-dos… Do you know how I can do that? Thanks
Phil Wiffen said,
8 May, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Tissinha, you can do it using the tool that I mentioned in the post: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
victor said,
26 September, 2008 at 12:42 am
thanks!
Camille said,
20 October, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I have a Gateway laptop, and I put one of my PS2 games on it and this blue screen came up saying things and restart your computer, and then went i restarted it, the Gateway logo came up, and then a black screen would come and then it would say (Operating System not found, failure check cable, and stuff like that. So I need help with fixing it.
PLEASE HELP ME!!!
Phil Wiffen said,
21 October, 2008 at 9:29 am
Camille, you should really call Gateway and see if they can help you. It sounds like either your Windows is gone, or the Master Boot Record is corrupt and needs fixing/rebuilding. You may need to use the Recovery discs to reinstall Windows from scratch