Looking over the other questions, none are exactly like mine.
I have a Acer 3000 abouot 2 years old. All of a sudden she resuses to load the operating system. I turn it on. I get the Acer logo and after the hd whirs and clicks a while and a SYS test screen is on, it then informs me that it can't find the operating system.

If I boot from the Acer recovery disk it goes to a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner that doesn't respond to the keyboard.

There is no way to get in to the recovery process.

I'm thinking bad hd. Fortunately there's no much on it. But I don't want to buy a new on (hd, that is) if a few key strokes or something else non-hardware will fix the problem.

ideas

i have the same feeling you do, faulty hd. acer makes cheep stuff, i have an acer laptop at home that is completely dead, one week after the warrenty lapsed.

OK, I bought a new hd but the laptop still is not booting with the recovery disk. It goes thru POST (I think). I can access the BIOS by hitting the F2 to make changes, like making the CD drive the highest priority. It gives me a screen that says it's loading windows 98, but then all it does is display a cursor in the upper left hand corner. I can't enter anything from the keyboard, but I do get beeps after a few key strokes.

Is there a set up procedure for the new hd that I must go thru in order for it to work?

If not, by process of elimination what's the most likely cause of the problem.

The BIOS chip seems to be working. Can the CPU be dead? I get the Acer logo screen.

if the cpu was dead, the computer wouldn't post... you said windows 98? wtf? how old is the computer?

well, when you go into the bios does it recognize the new hd?

The computer is about 2 years old and came with xp. but the recovery disk evidently uses 98.

How can I tell if it's recognizing the new hd?

well, all bios menus are different, but there should be a section that lists the bootable devices recognized by the mobo.

don't like Acer either ,but they don't make HDD's

just for the heck of it i would go to www.bootdisk.com and get a win98 bootdisk and fdisk and format the hdd.then try try recovery cd.,also possible the the recovery cd was just for excessing the hdd recovery partition on the old drive .

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255867/

I also have an Acer (Aspire 5602WLMi) that's also not long out of warantee and am presently having the same trouble. I found that the machine would not read from the onboard Pioneer DVD and connected my ext DVD drive and set the BIOS to read from it first which it did and I was able to reload the OpSystem. I hope this helps.