Acer Aspire L5100 help putting OS on it

Hello, I am working on a friends computer. I am familiar with HP's so I thought this acer couldn't be much different. But anyway here is my problem. I formatted the hard drive, the whole hard drive so the hidden partition is gone. ( I should have read before erasing things !! ) So I got the erecovery disks for the particular model and when I try to do a fresh install of Vista it goes about 50% and the I receive the BSOD. Which varies on error messages from NTFS.sys to page_fault_in_nonpaged_area. I have went through the memory diagnostics, no issues found. I also tried to change the BIOS to SATA but the only options I have are legacy IDE, raid or Native IDE. So not sure which one it should be on. I have searched and searched through this forum and tried various options and still I recieve the BSOD. I don't see alot of people with the 5100 model so if anyone is familar with this and could offer me some insite it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much. I just tried putting a fresh copy of windows 98 on there and it says that I don't have a cdrom driver ... weird. how could I not have one if it's reading the cd?

 

Check the SMART status of the HDD and use a freeware app like Nero Disc Speed to check if your backup DVDs are OK (readable)
You can also use a retail Windows DVD to install and then use a product key on the bottom of the chassis to activate it by phone (OEM keys are blocked from online activation nowadays)

 

How do I check the SMART status of the HDD?

 

You could use an app like HDTune if you had Windows running. Since you don't you need to create a bootable CD that tests your HD (warning-full test may take an hour or even more- be patient).
Such tools are usually available at HD manufacturer's website (i.e. SeaTools for Seagate)

 

Thank you I will give it a whirl.