Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
It turns out the situation is even worse than I thought. I spent the morning trying to use the OS included with the system to upgrade to a larger hard drive. No problem, just insert the hard drive and restore from the restore disk, right? No restore disk from Acer. You have to build your own. Ok, I have an external USB 2.0 DVD Burner, no problem. Burn the disk, (took 2 disks) swap out the hard drive and run the restore. Restore runs perfectly. Try booting the system. CMOS chksum error. Restore the default checksum. Try booting again. boot works for 5 seconds, then it flashes BSOD and reboots. Over and over. So now I have a machine that I can't restore at all from a hard drive crash. Works just fine from the 160 gb factory disk running windows XP Home SP3. If you used an upgrade disk for Win 7, you'd still be in the same boat, needing to re-install xp before re-installing the upgrade. An you can't get there from here.....
Ah well, it was a nice dream while it lasted...
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If I'm understanding you right, you pulled the original hard drive out and replaced it with another? If that's the case then that would explain why your restore disc didn't work. The way an OEM system restore disc works is by pulling data from a small (usually hidden) partition on the original drive; it does
not save the OS to the restore disc and reinstall it. Don't know why Acer wouldn't throw in a restore disc, but if you're doing a complete replacement (as opposed to just adding a 2nd hard drive) then a complete reinstall will be the only way.
Also, FYI when the upgrade is to Vista or Win7, a fesh install is generally the best route; I've seen strange things happen with the upgrade option, resulting in a fresh reinstall which is what the client should have done in the first place.
HOWEVER, if you simply want what you have now only on a bigger hard drive (i.e. system migration) then I would look into something like Shadow Copy which basically clones your hard drive. HTH.