I've just bought a new Acer Laptop. The 80gb hard drive was partitiond in two plus there was a hidden 3gb with recovery software on it. I decided to use Partition Magic to unpartition it. I configured it to make drive D merge with drvie C and off it went. Everything seemed to be going well then after it had finished it rebooted into a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner. And that's it basically. The hard drive indicator also flashes but nothing else happens. The manual says to press Alt and F10 to start recovery. So I did. Sure enough up came Symantec's Ghost image and it began to copy the files from the hiddden partition on to drive C. After it had finished it rebooted straight into the black page and blinking cursor again.
So that's the harddrive screwed. I went off to find a dvd for the optical drive but Acer didn't supply any and the only Windows disk I have is an upgrade version of Windows XP. When I tried to install this it said it couldn't find any previous version of Windows on the hard drive and could I please stick one in.
So that's it, basically. I have to go out and buy an 8 year old operating system in order to start up my brand new computer. How much would it have cost Acer to supply a recovery disk dvd? And what exactly has Partition Magic done to so comprehensively trash my new laptop?

Hello and welcome to PCHF,

They should have provided you with a recovery disk to begin with, check all the manuals and stuff you received with your laptop and just double check that there are no CD's.
Otherwise you can try going to their website or phoning them up and see whether they will provide you with a recovery disk. I can't see them being that expensive.
If you have recently purchased your laptop then they will probably provide it free.
Did you buy it straight from Acer or another source?

Not sure what happened, sounds like it may have overwritten important files.
Did you just try to merge the partitions or did you unpartition one of them?

Could you try and boot off your upgrade CD and see whether you can format or partition your drives. If you can make sure you format the C: drive then reboot and try to use Alt F10 again to re-setup your system.

Whatever you do, don't delete the E: partition just yet.

You can try contact Acer here and see what their response is:
http://www.acer.com.ph/service_recovery_solution.htm

There's definitely no recovery cd in the box. There was a stiff shrink wrapped Microsoft booklet which had 'for distribution with all new pcs' on the front. That had me fooled. But when I opened it there was just the booklet and a stiff piece of cardboard.
I've emailed Acer support and asked them to send me a recovery disk. I bought it from Ebuyer.co.uk. It's the Acer Aspire 3613 WMLi CEL-M 370. When I bought it on Tuesday there were 312 left now there are only 9. So it's obviously very popular. If you check the reviews you'll see that other buyers are complaing about the partition hard drive and lack of recovery disks, too. Fabulous computer, though.

Howdy lottilelenya and Welcome from me as well,
Also can you try this and see if this will help the recovery process.
Is there any way you can boot into safe mode? If so please do the below.
If not can you get into your BIOS by pressing esc and finding the button that says restore safe defualts.. Then try again.. Also do you have a floppy drive on your Laptop?

Right click my computer....Click properties...Click on advanced....Startup and recovery Settings.. Then click Edit.. Next you will see a screen below and can you copy and paste the boot.ini back here so we can see if there is somthing wrong with it.

As for Partition Magic you as you said merged the 2 partitions.. And maybe D was your backup partition. DO you have an E partition?

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers...k/as_3610.html

You can download all your drivers here, but that's not what you need. Couldn't find any thing like Recovery Disk on the website. Does the recovery console also reformat the harddrive?

Ya bluefish thats the problem with the partitionmagic merging the partitions:sad:

But lottielyna can fix all the partitions one way or another with a floppy disk or cd.