Acer Aspire 5920 - Recovery CD problems...

Hi everyone, I have a problem with my Aspire 5920 (about 10 months old) and hope someone can help. I will list everything that happened and how I tried to resolve it.

• 
  About a month ago, the laptop started going very slow, and now and again I got the blue screen of death. Also froze on me a lot.

• Then one day, after another blue screen, I switched it off and when I tried to switch it on again, I got the "disc read error" and "press ctrl-alt-del to restart".

• When I tried this, it just kept going in a loop back to the black screen with the above message on it.

• Since it was still under warranty, I took it to the shop where I bought it and the answer was that the disc was corrupt.

• As they refused to fix it for free since it was not covered under the warranty (and they wanted to charge me £185 to do it), I thought it might be better if I tried sorting it myself.

• I recovered all my data to an external disk, and then used my recovery CD (which I made myself on the day I bought the machine), to try and set it back to factory settings.

• This did not work (cannot remember the error).

• So I tried to install Vista from scratch (from an extra CD which I bought in error). Needless to say, this did not work either, but can't remember the error either.

• OK, it was time for drastic measures, and I went out and bought a new hard drive - exactly the same make (Toshiba) and exactly the same size (160GB).

• So I tried the recovery disc again, but it still did not work - I got a "type mismatch" error.

• So, I checked the sizes of the partitions on my old hard drive - and set the new hard drive up with the same partitions, and roughly the same sizes (could not get them exactly the same size).

• So, I now had two hidden partitions and a C and D partition.

• When I tried the restore again, it did go all the way through both CD's and then attempted to start Vista, but no luck. It just stuck on one screen and did not do anything.

• So, as a last resort, I tried installing Vista from my extra Vista CD, but got loads of errors when it's trying to run Vista.

• I have run out of options, and sometimes wish I just paid the £185 to get it sorted - but I'm sure there must be a way to fix it.

Please, if anyone out there has the time, and the know-how to try and help me, it will be greatly appreciated.

 

You might want to post your errors. Makes it kind of hard to figure out. I have a 5920 and never had any problems installing windows on it. Do you have an old copy of xp. Try to install that and if it works you can install vista thought xp.