Reload W7 on Acer laptop

[lakedude]

The original drive is bad or going bad. Got a new SSD coming. How to reload? No disks came with the computer.

The old HD has bad sectors. The recovery partition might be okay, or maybe not. Many things copied over fine but every once in a while a file will be unreadable.

Had "The User Profile Service failed the logon, User Profile cannot be loaded" twice. Fixed it the first time but now it is pretty clear the HD is going bad.

I've got an OEM W7 pro disk but the laptop came with Home Premium.

Lappy is a 5742z-4685 with a legit copy of W7 HP.

Ideas?

 

[lakedude]

Ordered recovery disk for $19.95, free shipping, no tax.

They should let you download an ISO but 20 bucks isn't so bad, I guess. My fault for not having backups and recovery disks available. I might have them actually but finding them is another matter...

 

[phis6]

If you have a legitimate W7 Pro disk, they you might also be able to use that for your laptop.

 

[cubby1223]

use these:

http://www.w7forums.com/threads/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads.12325/
http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers

Burn the iso image to a dvd, load Windows, it'll take the key, you'll likely just have to phone in the activation part.

 

[Drummerdude]

Agreed with ^^^^^ Otherwise, you could always Ghost over your old hdd to your new ssd, then fix any file system errors/corruptions from there.

 

[lakedude]

Thanks for the help. Cubby1223 those links are awesome.

I had already ordered factory recovery disks from Acer by the time some of these suggestions were posted. The disks came a few days ago and I'm happy to report the laptop is working faster than ever thanks to the new SSD.

The factory disks were a bit of a pain. There were 5 or 6 disks and the reload took several hours. Even after all the disks were finished copying the software still had to install itself which took a very long time.

After the install completed the computer would shut down completely when the screen saver kicked on. Works fine with the screen saver disabled??

 

[lakedude]

So a friend just dropped off an essentially similar system that also has a bad hard drive. Both systems are Acer 5742's with 320GB Hitachi hard drives, quite a coincidence?

Are these drives known to be crap?

The cool thing is that the factory disks I purchased for our laptop should also work on the friend's laptop.