Question:
Aspire 3023 new hard drive
My Aspire 3023 has just gone out of warranty so naturally the hard drive has decided to pack up.:mad: I have purchased a replacement drive and wonder what is the best way to achieve a nice clean NTFS XP Home install.
Currently I have 3 media types to choose from:-
1)The 3 cd Acer restore set supplied with the laptop (+COA on laptop).
2)The single DVD back up disc I burnt when the laptop was new.
3)A non branded OEM sp2 XP home disc (came with my desktop).
Since I’ve never worked with restore discs before I’m not sure if I need to Fdisk/format the new drive first? – most of the threads I’ve read seem to assume that the original drive is present. Do I need to worry about the Acer MBR on a new disk?
Any advice or pointers to relevant threads would be much appreciated!
Answer:
Re: Aspire 3023 new hard drive
The Acer disc will format the laptop automatically. It is a pretty streamlined process from what I remember. I believe it might format the drive with a FAT32 file system. It is easy to convert to NTFS:
http://www.ntfs.com/quest3.htm
3)A non branded OEM sp2 XP home disc (came with my desktop).
That may not install on your system.
Answer:
Re: Aspire 3023 new hard drive
Thanks Chaz,
I used the DVD back up disc in the end (which turns out to be bootable). It created a single fat32 partion on the new drive with out any intervention and copied Windows to it. On reboot I was back to new PC status (none of my settings had been saved with the back up). I had to load the ATI and modem drivers manualy but apart from that it was all very slick.
Regards,
JJ