40drhol can I erase and reuse a good hardrive, I have the recovery cd and the otherboard cd. hanks Rich

Hello, it looks like somehow the master boot record was erased from the hard drive, maybe viral? You mentioned the hard drive was recognized in the bios correct? If you need data from the hard drive the easiest way would be to pull the hard drive out and use an external hard drive enclosure to remove the data before you erase everything from the hard drive. If you dont need anything thing you can proceed to do a new install of Windows 7. Turn the computer on then hold alt and the f10 key to perform a factory recovery. This will erase everything and reinstall Windows 7. If this doesnt work then you will need a new hard drive and a bootable usb drive with Windows 7 on it. Hope this helps.

formatting it was a bad idea.
if you did that and ERASED the HP, partitions called, Recovery
now the F11 Recovery feature is gone for ever.
id bet those were not bad, I bet the junior tech, replaces them in that order guessing at your cost, as is so common today.
but lets forget the past, it's gone.
if the F11 key (or what the manual says) is dead its dead.
that takes what? a good HDD, next. if its good and the CD drive works, (many dont now) then you can disk install the OS.
but you have no disks, do you,
all HP new they sold the disk set called the HP media kit
if you didnt buy them when new, they are long long gone.
this is a 2014 PC correct, the service guide page 17 tells you how to use the HDD, magic, recovery.
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04329428

if you erased the HDD , that will be and expensive fix.
never erase any HP HDD , unless buying a used one to use.
or you get to buy windows again,
or run Ubuntu linux 16 , for free. (a great choice)
if if you must erase, just do the root of C:/
clearing out all of windows.
and not touching this.

here is W7
do not erase the 2 partitions on the right ever. (if not rich)
think of them as VIRTUAL INSTALL DISKS.
cuz they are.
http://www.pcdied.com/W7-FMT.JPG

good luck
best is upgrade to w7, or to w10 . Vista is now a DEAD OS.
best is to avoid xp and vistafor ever.

You will need to format the hardrive. This means you will be erasing EVERYTHING on the hardrive. Before you do this though, you will want to make sure that you have the restore disk and system disk which should have come with your computer. If you don't have these disks do not attempt this, you will end up with just a big paper weight.
Have you tried using the "restore" option in accessories? This will restore your computer back to an ealier checkpoint without losing the operating system and drivers. I would try this first.
Hope this helps

Copy all your data into the computer as backup and format the disk with old data, this will completely erase the old data and u can now reuse them whenever you want to from the computer or you can write them into cd through your memoex cd-rw or sony cd-rw. thanks

the cd recovery you have need connect to hard disk by some files system when u change new hard miss these files so cannot do it. only u recover by use ghost from image

If you formatted your hardrive you don't have windows anymore. The format erased it. You'll need to get your Windows CD out and re-install.

Hi there.
Just make sure the boot order is set to the CD/DVD, you can do this by going into the bios or pressing F12 while the computer starts up.
please post back if you need any more assistance.

Regards

Your ACER Extensa should have come with a recovery CD. Just boot up to that CD and follow the instructions.

the only thing i can really say would be that try another windows disk if that works then the recovery cd is not formatted to boot.

I’m happy to help further over the phone at https://www.6ya.com/expert/alex_32392698f23d119d

Try to replace the CD drive