Hi everyone,

I am trying to set up a laptop for a friend, and she is giving me her old laptop harddrive, however I cannot get the drivers off the old hdd to put on the new harddrive, does anyone know how I can do it. Acer customer support were not interested in helping, they just kept saying it'll have to be reimaged and that has a cost associated to it.

I would very much like to do it myself for free :-)

thank for any help

If it's only drivers you need, you can find them on Acer's site, for XP as well as for Vista for that model. I't be easier indeed to reimage it with her install CDs if you could find them.

If it's still the original HDD, you can try reimaging from the "recovery partition" (also if it hasn't been wiped) by pressing a key combination at boot, I think it's Shift+F10 (and it first need to be enabled in Bios), but I guess their helpdesk would have told you so.

If it's only drivers you need, you can find them on Acer's site, for XP as well as for Vista for that model. I't be easier indeed to reimage it with her install CDs if you could find them.

If it's still the original HDD, you can try reimaging from the "recovery partition" (also if it hasn't been wiped) by pressing a key combination at boot, I think it's Shift+F10 (and it first need to be enabled in Bios), but I guess their helpdesk would have told you so.

No, the HDD is in an external USB case thing.

I have no idea how to get to the secret partion to get to the drivers

any ideas, and make them really simple i am really dumb LOL

if you can't get to a secret partition, just find the model on their site and it should allow you to download all the drivers for it

Could try putting the old disc in the machine, recover, and image that fresh install partition to the new HDD. You'd have to edit boot.ini.

Or image the whole drive to the new one then recover ?

Just clone the drive with Acronis True Image for example.

You can backup the hidden restore partition by doing the following:

1. Bootup the machine with a copy of "I Have the Password" and access the 1st Partition by going to Disk Utilities/Paragon Partition Mgr and running Partition Browser. Export a copy of the partition to a folder on a hard drive. Burn it to a dual layer DVD data disk.

2. For anybody who needs to restore the ERecovery software, so they can use the restore partition (maybe because they installed a different operating system on the hard drive), just burn the only iso file found on the restore partition to a cd, then boot up with that cd... it will copy the ERecovery software to the C drive.

You can use diskpart to reveal the hidden partition, that is, as long as it can see it. You would need to post a full info about the volume/disk/partition before I could tell you what commands to use.