Acer Aspire One Netbook hard drive issue

I recently worked on an Acer Aspire One Netbook (Model AOD150). The netbook was no longer able to boot, as the system could not find an operating system. Booting the netbook up onto a USB drive, I was able to see the problem. The hard drive had two partitions, one hidden recovery partition and one active system (C:\) partition that had become corrupt.

The only solution was to use the recovery media. Only the owner did not have an external CD / DVD writer, so she could not create the recovery media. I contacted Acer, and they sent out new media for free. I got the media and reloaded the netbook, and all was well. I had a chance to work with it a little bit and liked the size, battery life, and cost. So I decided to pick one up.

I purchased an Acer Aspire One Netbook (Model AO571h). After allowing the system to restart a couple of times for set up, it was ready to go on first boot. I proceeded to connect a DVD writer and created the recovery media. I then decided to look at the hard drive partitions, so I put a bootable cd in the external optical drive I just used to create the recovery media and reboot.

Booted the netbook up on a PE (preinstall environment) cd, and all looked fine. The netbook had two partitions, one hidden recovery partition at 8 gigabytes and one active system (C:\) partition at 141 gigabytes, for a rough total of 149 gigabytes. That was correct for a 160 gigabyte hard drive once formatted.

I turned off the netbook and external DVD drive, disconnected the DVD, and restarted the netbook. What happened next was deja vu. The screen displayed cannot find operating system error. I turned it off, reconnected the external DVD drive, and proceeded to reload the system with the disks I had just created.

I reloaded the netbook and then checked the hard drive. This time there was only one active system (C:\) partition at 149 gigabytes. The system works fine and has had no problems since.

Remember, if your new laptop, netbook, or personal computer does not come with recovery media (disks), you probably have to make them yourself. This is the first thing that should be done. Luckily for me, that's just what I did.