This week ended with an Acer Aspire One notebook Windows 7 Starter disaster recovery. Well, actually it was one of those $199 notebooks that was hardly worth the recovery of the hardware, but the data that was previously on the notebook was definitely worth a lot more than the value of the hardware. The Acer Aspire One notebook hard drive crashed just after 1 year from the purchase date. Freshly out of warranty the big contemplation began. To buy new or not to buy new. With 2.5″ SATA hard drives priced at about $80 and no recovery disks one begins to teeter towards replacing the unit at a fresh $249. We searched high and low for a used 2.5″ SATA hard drive.

Reinstall Windows 7 starter onto an Acer Aspire One Netbook? SATA Driver for Acer Aspire One D257. Install Windows 7 but keep recovery partitions in dell.

It was extremely difficult to find anything used that was closer to to the 100GB without sacrificing too much speed. The Acer Aspire One sat on a shelf for almost 2 years until the need or should say the nice to have notebook became more of a necessity.

So the project of reviving this unit began once again. The original hard drive was 160GB which was more than plenty of space for an avid user and with our base online backup of 500GB priced at $24.50/year, one would sure never to need more space for the online backup. The smallest new hard drive we could locate was 500GB. At $90 + tax and another $50 for an Acer Aspire One restore disk we were off an running. Well, the tech at Futureshop gave me a one final “goodluck” comment as he watched me turn and walk away, I began to think does he know something I don’t know or has he been down this road before?

In hindsight I should have taken that comment and opted for his expertise to restore the operating system. Now that it is complete I look back and think that for another $50 (or $190 total) I could have had it done by the experts. While now that I think about it, not much of an expert that watched me walk into a brick wall after I left his store.

After launching the restore disks and repeatedly having to restart because Windows wouldn’t get past this popup message. So I began my online research. Ok folks, I’m a techy, and some of you may have experienced this before but it took me a while to figure out and this lesson was learned deeply so that I will never forget. Cartones de bingo de 80 bolas para imprimir pdf de los dos. So many people have actually had this problem before much to my surprise as the forums were littered with suggestions of how to get through this hurdle of restoring windows on this Acer Aspire One notebook.

I knew I was in too deep at this point because even if I attempted to back out, I may have been able to return the hard drive but I think I would have been out of luck with the copy of restore disks. Most likely they would have accused me of making a copy and trying to return them. While I couldn’t clone the hard drive, there were at times where I would have returned it to its basic building blocks of sand from the frustration. I finally located one article on a blog post that provided the best instructions as of yet, that I found but only after you finish my story to see how it ends.

While the restore disks I received were for Windows 7, it didn’t allow you to select which version of Windows 7. This Acer Aspire One notebook must have some kind of hardware encoded feature that would only allow it to have Windows 7 Starter installed on it. The full version of Windows 7 that the restore disks was attempting to install just would not run. In hindsight now knowing this the restore disks were completely useless to me. So began the route to rebuilding the operating system from scratch and abandoning the restore disks.

I highly doubt I could qualify for a refund for those, I should have never bought it, never needed them in the first place, now I know darn lessons always cost money!! After trying every suggestion I could find online, the last one worked. Doesn’t the last one always work?

I downloaded. Burned it to a DVD (20 minutes). Then attempted the install and watched it crash at the same point. I tried to load Windows XP SP1 on the notebook and watched it fail. It seems to fail at the exact same point regardless of the version of Windows which tells me that the hardware is encoded with something.