Desktops & All-In-Ones

[Ayorama]

Hi, my hard drive from my Acer Aspire M7721 , Winsdows 7 home prem OA crashed.

I do have the recovery DVD made when i bought the pc.

I have bought a same size hard drive and tried to use the recovery dvd's, but they do not start.

On a forum it was written that these dvd's need to use a partition on the old (dead) drive and that the only solution was to download a iso copy from digital river software. The installation went all right and key was accepted, but after 2 days this MS warning came that the key was not accepted for activation. 

I went to the register process and had a talk with a operator who said it was not possible to use this key and the only solution was to buy a new product. 

Is there ANY way i will be able to use my recovery disks to get my 'own' windows 7 back, and use they key which came with the PC?

I have as well a Ghost image which i made after all the updates were installed. (Hiren Boot 9.8). I tried to recover from the ghost image which just gave a error. 

Thanks,

Pia 

[vvprad]

Hi..

If you are using the recovery DVDs of this Acer Aspire M7721, it will not ask you to enter the product key, as it's the OEM WIndows and the product key is embedded on the DVD. To fix this issue, you may format the hard drive and try to install Windows using the recovery DVDs once again. Again, the computer will not ask you for the product key.

Note: Formatting and installing Windows will cause data loss. Make sure that you backup the data before you format the hard drive.

[Ayorama]

Hi, 

Thank you for your answer. What would be different this time when you believe they wil start up now? or other question why did they not start up with the new hard disk. 

Not much data get lost as i have not put back my data backups yet because i want to have this solved first. So it is mainly installed (the wrong) windows yet.

So it is not true that these recovery dvd's need a boot partition on the hard drive to start?  

What i have made (4 years ago) Recovery dvd 1-3 and one which is called 'Repair disk Windows 7 64 bit'

[vvprad]

Hi...

In order to boot the hard drive from the recovery discs, there shouldn't be more than one partition on the hard drive.  You may remove the partitions on the hard drive (if have created) and format the HDD.

[Ayorama]

No partitions created, so it is not that either  It is frustrating