Fresh installation of Windows 7 on an Acer laptop

[csziggy]

4. Tried a fresh install - reformatted the hard drive - no joy

Now I believe that the hard drive is corrupted and that is why the recovery process wouldn't work.

After letting the Windows installation disk reformat and repartition the drive, it cannot copy and expand the files needed for installation. So now the stinking thing has no OS.

The drive is a Seagate 500GB Momentus, so I downloaded SeaTools ISO, created a bootable CD with the tool and tried to check out the drive. I'm not sure if it is because it is an OEM drive or because the drive is bad but SeaTools does not see any drive attached to the laptop.

Tomorrow we'll take it into a repair shop and let the guy there check it out. If it is just the drive, he probably has one on hand to install. I don't feel like buying a laptop drive just to find out that it is a hardware problem somewhere else in the machine. Heck, if it is the motherboard, my friend at the shop might have a used laptop and give us credit for this one if he thinks he can use it for parts.

I HATE laptops! If it were a desktop I would be comfortable messing around inside the case. With laptops I am not willing to mess with them - too little space and too much crap in those little cases.

Meanwhile my husband is dragging one of our old computers out of the attic. They were both functional, running Windows XP, when we stored them away. We even have a monitor, keyboard and mouse for one desktop computer so he will have something to surf the internet until his laptop is fixed or replaced.