Notebooks & Netbooks

[Marty_McSly]

As the title suggests, I've had to replace the hard disk in an Aspire v5 due to unrecoverable corruption. Is there a CD/DVD I can buy or an image I can download from Acer to reinstall the system?

Alternatively, can I use the recovery partition on the original hard drive, mounted externally, to do same? Using the Disk Manager tool on a Ubuntu live CD, I was able to check the partitions on the original drive and found that the corruption was limited to the Windows partition.

Finally, I've installed a 1TB disk in place of the original 750GB unit. Will this give me any grief?

[philetus]

Did you try factory recovery with the old HDD before you removed it?

[Marty_McSly]

Probably not. It's my son's computer, I don't touch it because I regard Windows 8 as the work of the devil :-)

I did try Windows repair AFAIK, my son found some key combos on the web. It would boot into Windows repair but then report that it couldn't sucessfully repair.

The drive has 1.3GB of unreadable sectors, so I'm not willing to risk using it again.

I have images of all the partitions that I made with Ubuntu's Disk Manager as well, only the Windows partition has 1.3GB of zeroes substituted for unreadable sectors. Could I restore the system restore partition to the new disk and start fresh with that, or are the Windows install files kept somewhere else?

There is a "push-button" (or somesuch) partition of approx 16GB. Is that what gets copied to USB stick for system recovery? Can I use it in some way to make a recovery stick without having the Windows utility available?

[philetus]

Why not put the old drive back in and try recovery? If it works then all you have to do is clone the HDD to the new one.

[Marty_McSly]

Mainly because of the risk of further sectors corrupting during the process.

[IronFly]

if you are in the US:

http://store.acer.com/store/aceramer/en_US/eRecovery

[Marty_McSly]

No RCD available for my serial number, in bold red type.

Might have something to do with being in Australia?

I'm trying something. It's convoluted and very slow, but offers the possibility of being able to recover some of my son's files (which are not backed up).

If it works I'll post it up.

[IronFly]

yes, not available in Australia.

you must call them:

http://www.acer.com.au/ac/en/AU/content/service-contact

[philetus]

Put it back in, clone it to a remote HDD for a backup and then try recovery.

[Marty_McSly]

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philetus wrote:

Put it back in, clone it to a remote HDD for a backup and then try recovery.

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I had taken image copies of each partition using Ubuntu's disk manager tool (technically, Palimpsest). I tried restoring these to the new hard disk and recovering. No dice, unfortunately.

Neither will the original disk recover. I suspect a clone of the original won't fly either, but I have a spare disk of the exact make and model as the corrupted disk, and a 2-bay external drive dock with an inbuilt cloning function.

Worth a try, as I've been able to restore as many of my son's files as are readable from the partition image, so now I have no need to preserve the state of the original disk.