Acer Extensa 5620z recovery with new HDD

I'm working on a Acer for a co-worker. Her HDD was bad, so we purchased a new 320GB Sata from BB. I also purchased the erecovery cd's from Acer directly. I installed the new HDD and placed the System Disc 1 of 2 in the drive. I already had it set to boot from CD. At first try it keep telling me no partition. So I used my Ubuntu CD to create a partition. I get it to boot from System Disc 1, I chose english and get to the second screen that tells me everything will be deleted. I select OK and it says "Please insert backup disk 2 or the Recovery CD" I insert the Recovery Disk 1 of 2. The original Acer eRecovery Mangement screen never goes away. After about 15 mins the cd pops out and ask "Please insert backup disk 2 or the Recovery CD".

After reading some post here, I thought that it might be because I formatted as NTFS. So I went in and create 310GB partition named "ACER" as FAT32 and 10GB partition named "ACERDATA". Same problem.

I contacted ACER support and at first Suju said your laptop is no longer under warranty, I said OK, AND?, I just purchased these cd's from you and they are not working. She told me to email support and wait for an answer.

Has anyone ran across this problem before? I know it would be easier to install Win 7 or Vista fresh, but I don't want to have to keep working on this laptop over and over. I can teach someone how to recovery if I had the software on the laptop.

Any help would be great.

 

Hi,

there are many reports like this. No idea if the people at Acer ever tried these discs

My suggestion:
Do a clean install using a normal Windows install disc. Do not use the entire HDD (FAT32 is evil btw) for Windows, but let ~10 GB for your own "recovery stuff".
Then create an image of that preinstallation and store it into the "recovery partition" you created. It is not a bad idea to hide the partition later (and not assigning a drive letter).

Incase you need to reinstall again, then just restore the image you created.

I personally like Partimage for such jobs, not sure, if it is already on the Ubuntu CD.

Michael

 

Thanks Michael. I just went ahead and did a clean install of Win 7 and said forget it. Told my co-worker to never bring me this laptop to work on again lol.