Acer recovery disk on new hard drive do not start.

Ayorama
Ayorama Member Posts: 3 New User
in 2015 Archives

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 

Answers

  • vvprad
    vvprad Member Posts: 246 Mr. Fixit WiFi Icon

    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
    Ayorama Member Posts: 3 New User

    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
    vvprad Member Posts: 246 Mr. Fixit WiFi Icon

    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
    Ayorama Member Posts: 3 New User

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

  • Anononle1
    Anononle1 Member Posts: 2 New User

    I wish there was closure on these threads. 

    IE.  So, I was able to do it using the disc's provided in this order or something rather than just ______ (nada).

  • JordanB
    JordanB ACE Posts: 3,729 Pathfinder

    This thread is almost a year old.  So at the risk of poor forum etiquette,  I'll give a few things to try if anyone else is experiencing this problem.  

     

    From what I've read, this is not an Acer specific issue.  It can happen on any computer brand or with any HDD or SSD.  It's not necessarily a BIOS specific issue either as I believe it can happen with all the major BIOS providers.

     

    Here's a short list of things to try that not only have worked for me, but others have also reported as fixes.

     

    To get things working it's usually some combination of the following.  In all cases, you'll want to make sure that you only have the problem HDD/SSD connected to the computer.  All other drives should be disconnected.

     

    1.  Using "diskpart clean" (which will wipe the drive and should put it in uninitialized state and in the same condition as it was when it came from the SSD/HDD factory.)  This may have to be done more than once.

     

    2. Shutdown the computer (this may have to be done more than once).  Shutting down the computer doesn't mean pulling the power cord.  It means gracefully/properly shutting down the computer using USB tools on a recovery drive.

     

    3. Unplug the computer from the electrical outlet after its been gracefully shutdown.  And wait anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes.

     

    4. Unplug the SATA power cable.

     

    5.  Unplug the SATA data cable.

     

    6.  Turn on the computer with only the SATA power cable connected, but not the SATA data cable.

     

    7.  Shutting down the computer and then unplugging it from electrical outlet.

     

    8.  Turning on the computer with both SATA power cable and SATA data cable connected.

     

    There's various reports across the internet in different forums about using some combination of the steps above.  You may not need to use all of the steps or you may need to use a certain step more than once.  Since most of the threads that describe the fixes are from average users, in most cases they aren't going back to try and reproduce the issue to narrow down which step(s) actually fixed the problem.

    I'm not an Acer employee.

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