Your Acer notebook
Thanks for all your help again, if i get a new hard drive do i need to buy windows for it?
I've had the laptop for 18 month's.
Hi Martyb-
I have sold and even bought an ACER myself. Being an IT specialist, I've cracked my 14.1" LCD and had to use my restore CD/DVD to recovery my OS. If the media is corrupted, you could contact ACER for a replacement disk,and use the product ID key from the unit if you had too... but, see if you can access the BIOS menu, and see if it detects everything. See if you can get into the BIOS to determine if the HDD is surely corrupted, or damaged... maybe even to see if anything else has gone wrong. I'm sorry, we are driving you around like a crazy person with all of this.
But, if the hdd is bad, you will not be able to boot up on the drive, but you may find that it spins and seems to work and could easily be bad. One idea would be to remove the drive, place it inside another computer, or attach an external 2.5" hdd drive enclosure and see if you can read the drive from it by another computer. If you can access the content off the drive, then you know you have a chance to format it and install a fresh installation and getting it to work.
You can, also... after removing the drive and placing it inside an external box... and pull the data off it and back it up. I did this to mine and found there were corrupted files with the OS that I had no choice but to recover the files and use my recovery disc.
But if your disc are bad, scratched... contact ACER and see if they can send you a replacement disk.
https://secure3.tx.acer.com/RCD/Main.aspx
Hope this helps!