3002 LMi HDD busted - what now?

My 3.5 years old Aspire 3002LMi apparently suffered a hard drive failure yesterday. First it refused to be woken up from the standby mode, making a new, bad noise. I did get it to power up and run smoothly for several hours, but then the computer shut itself down in the middle of preparing to write a system recovery disk with the Acer eRecovery software. On the next start up, it just made bad noises and got stuck on the black XP start up screen.

I decided to try replacing the HDD rather than buying a new computer, but then I wondered how am I going to get my XP back? I burned something recovery-related on four CDs when prompted right after I had gotten the laptop to run 3.5 years ago. However, I don't have the disks at hand and can't remember what exactly it is that is on those disks. So, my question is this: can I use those four disks to reinstall the old system on a new hard drive?

Plan B is to use hubby's WinXP install CD (OEM version) and my product activation key but can this cause further problems with Windows?

Any info would be greatly appreciated!

 

Yes you should be able to use the recovery discs to re-install XP if you can find them.

Not sure about the OEM CD. How was it acquired? Some manufacturers tie the disc to their machines. For example a Dell disc will only work on a Dell. If it's a generic OEM disc, you shouldn't have a problem.

If it's the same version of XP and your key won't work, just use the one that came with the disc. You should have 30 days to activate. XP's activation program allows you to change the key, at which point you could change it to the key that came with your machine then activate it over the internet. I do this all the time and have never had a problem with it. Good Luck.

 

Thanks for the reply! I know where the discs are but they're a hundred miles away, so I need to wait a few days before I can get my hands on them and see if the recovery works.

The OEM CD came with a computer that had been built from self-picked components, so it should be a generic OEM disc. Good to know that there shouldn't be any problems with that.

 

If you can get the old hard disk to work for long enough, you can place it into an external usb caddy and then use a program such as Drive Snapshot to take an image of your old hard disk and then write this image onto a new one.

Sounds like your old hard disk may be too far gone to do this though. Just a thought.

 

You may need to use the key that came with the OEM disc as the key on machine may not work, but you can change it via the activation program.

 

Yeah, it's probably a little too late for the old hard disk, but I'll keep that in mind for the new one. Thanks for the tip!

Okay. Now I'll know not to panic about that if it comes down to using the OEM disc. Thank you!

 

ACER recovery software does not need any keys .

The laptop BIOS are the key .

XP and software gets installed with out user interaction, other than inserting CDs .

A very simple job for the most .

 

Yeah, I figured that the recovery software doesn't need a key.

However, the recovery process isn't doing its job. It boots from the CD #1 okay, then asks for CD #2 and after I've put that in, it tries to start something. I get a screen that mentions Acer Recovery and Symantec on the top of the screen and almost instantly it gives an error message "Usage Error 11030" and says "invalid destination drive" and just asks the CD #1 again, so I'm now stuck.

I checked the BIOS and it seems to recognize the new HDD, but I have no idea what to do next. Other settings said (among others) that the D2D recovery is enabled and that the F12 boot menu is disabled - though I don't even know which are the right settings or if these are even relevant at this point. I changed the HDD from 80 Gb to 160 Gb, could this be a part of the problem or is it something else?

 

This may be of interest.

 

Thanks for the link, but it wasn't really helpful as I wasn't getting the other error message that the posters there got.

However, I tried the WinXP CD and that did run okay until the computer shut itself down in the middle of formatting the hard disk. This was probably due to overheating, so I cleaned the dust from the fan and tried again, but the WinXP CD refused to do anything but say that the loading of the OS failed. As a last ditch effort I tried the recovery CDs again and this time they worked, so I'm guessing that the recovery CDs had a problem with the original formatting/partitioning of the new hard disk.