Operating system not found after installing new hard drive

you had a catastrophic hard drive failure and you expect things to go smoothly ?..... screw cloning. reinstall opsys on the new disc. after everything is said and done............ and machine is running with everything installed, hook up old drive, let windows find it ( hopefully ) and then start pulling data from it if you can.

recovery discs.......... should never let them dump these on you. you paid for an opsys you should have gotten that with the computer.

Hi there and thank you for replying.

I have as I said in the post tried to reinstall the O/S from the suplied discs, and I get the o/s not found message.
Everything is backed up, so I just want to get the system up and running.
The old drive is dead and is not fouind by a working computer. However as I say I am not interested as I have my data backed up

Thanks again

buy an operating system/

Very helpful

your original HD is shot. the partition won't be found. repair disc won't work. buy another operating system.

Hello,

What OS have you been using on the laptop? Do you have the Windows OS CD and the Driver CD that came with the laptop at time of purchase, and did you install the files as instructed in your manual, Windows first, then the device drivers, then utility programs?

Connect the new HDD (with restored OS and drivers) to you Acer laptop
Boot up to the StartUp screen and enter the BIOS. See if the BIOS recognizes the new HDD. Also make sure this HDD is first in the Boot Order Menu, should be HDD, DVD, USB. Next check the HDD boot order. There should only be 1 HDD, this one, listed as a choice. If the older drive is still listed from the BIOS, make this new one the HDD to access.

Report results.

Also another helpful diagnostic step, if possible, is to connect this new HDD to a desktop computer as a secondary SATA connection, or USB to SATA bridge. Then boot up to the desktop, right click on My Computer, Manage, Computer Management, and in the lower left area Disk Management.
If possible upload a screenshot of this Disk Management dialog box to show with your next post. That way we can see if it is set up properly, partitioned correctly, and marked as active to the BIOS will look for it at boottime.

Thank you John
the laptop used XP as its O/S
The disks that came with the laptop are a "system" disc and two "recovery" disks.
Yes I followed all the instructins in the manual and it "appeared" to go ok

The system disk seems to create windows (I can see the folders for windows being created as the "progress ribbon" extends, Following that the two recovery" disks are requested and extracted from.

Yes the bios recognises the HDD ad the boot order is as you described, and the HDD is the only one listed

Very confused now, but thank you for replying

Did you partition and format this new HDD before you installed your OS and recovery files on it?

Also another helpful diagnostic step, if possible, is to connect this new HDD to a desktop computer as a secondary SATA connection, or USB to SATA bridge. Then boot up to the desktop, right click on My Computer, Manage, Computer Management, and in the lower left area Disk Management.
If possible upload a screenshot of this Disk Management dialog box to show with your next post. That way we can see if it is set up properly, partitioned correctly, and marked as active to the BIOS will look for it at boottime.

The next important step is as above. Use Photobucket or ImageShack to upload the screenshot which you would save with clipit, or snagit or even printscreen as a jpg or png file. Then just copy and paste the IMG code or Img thumbcode from their page.That will show us if it is partitioned properly, if the system drive is marked as active. Requires connecting the new HDD to a separate computer to evaluate it.

Hi John
thank you for your efforts and following your advice, I decided to start over.
Although previously I had formatted the drive and partitioned it for some reason I decided to do a full low level format before tying.

When I booted using the recovery disk - hey presto! screens I had not seen before sprung up and windows was duly installed from the recovery discs, followed by the software that the computer came with.

Thank you anyway, and hope this may help someone else with a similar problem