Help required with HDD recovery tool & reinstalling windows 8.1 from recovery discs on aspire v1

mouttonnoir

Hi guys. I'm new to this and in total confusion. I purchased an aspire v15 nitro preloaded with win 8.1. I upgraded to win 10 but decided to roll back to 8.1. Process failed and I got blue screen error msg and  a useless lump of plastic. I had to purchase a set of recovery discs (reluctanlty at a cost of £51- yeah I know stupid of me). I have attempted to reinstall from the discs but I'm getting nowhere. I cntacted acer and they now tell me that I firstly need to download and instal and HDD formating tool. I am now totally confused frustrated and quietly seething. I need help, I'm outta my depth here. Can anyone provide some assistance as to which HD formatting tool to download- what I need to do with it in order to finally get the laptop up and running again? Your assistance is greatly appreciated!

IronFly

if you recovery media has standard windows options, you can try to select "repair my pc" -troubleshoot - Advanced options - Command Prompt
once in command prompt type
diskpart
then on diskpart type
list disk
take note of the correct disk ID to erase
type
select disk x
(x is the ID of your HDD to erase)
type
clean
type exit

 

if you don't have this options:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html
download the .iso file
then use a software to burn CD/DVD or USB flash drive and burn the .iso file
once done, put the CD/DVD/USB on your PC, boot from CD/USB (maybe you need to boot under Legacy if you have UEFI BIOS)
press F12 at boot and choose CD or USB
at the desktop
select your HDD
right click on your HDD icon and choose wipe your HDD completly (it will erase also any GPT or MBR on the HDD), choosing the first option after selecting the wipe function.
then exit partition wizard, boot to BIOS, set UEFI back from Legacy (if you have UEFI BIOS) and boot from the erecovery media.