Notebooks & Netbooks

[t_burkholder]

I have an Acer Aspire 5742Z that will no longer bootup. I purchased the Acer recovery disks and installed them with no problem. They seemed to install properly, but the laptop still won't bootup; after the recovery installation I still get the message "BOOTMGR is missing". I assume that the recovery disk files were being saved to the hard drive, so I would think the hard drive still works. I also checked to be sure the boot options sequence lists the hard drive first. Can someone help? Thanks.

[JackE]

Have you tried to restore to factory defaults from the recovery partition on the HDD itself? You may still have an HDD problem but it may be worth a try as in this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVT0Z9r6_Q

Jack E/NJ  

[tommis15]

Since you have the disks, I would download active killdisk (http://how-to-erase-hard-drive.com/downloadfree.htm) and format your drive with that. Choose the dos iso and burn it to a cd. When that's done, I would try the recovery disks... If those fail, you can always do the following:

If you have windows 7, you could download the original disks from digital river (completely legal):
Digital River is an official microsoft online distributor... 

Windows 7 Home Premium 32Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-58996.iso
Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-58997.iso

Windows 7 Professional 32Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59183.iso
Windows 7 Professional 64Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59186.iso

Windows 7 Ultimate 32Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59463.iso
Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59465.iso

Then just use the product key on the certificate of authenticity (sticker on bottom of laptop) to activate...

Good luck, tommis.

[finlux]

I agree with JackE, try the recovery partition - but it does sound like a hard drive issue...