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I have my girl friend's laptop which is a Acer travelmate 2420, and it's running Windows XP OS. She wants me to wipe out the hard drive and reinstall windows for her, but she doesn't have an OS install disk or a recovery disk. Is there a way for me to make a recovery disk?

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Dani AI

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Short summary and plan of attack: the freeze you describe usually points to one of three things — the optical burner or blank media, a damaged/corrupt recovery image or partition, or a software/permission conflict. , try the isolation steps below; they follow up on ’s suggestions (target size, encryption, background activity) and are ordered so you can find the root cause quickly.

First checks (fast, no risk)

  • Confirm the recovery partition still exists (Disk Management: run diskmgmt.msc) — if the partition or image used by Acer’s recovery tool is missing or corrupt the builder will fail.
  • Try a simple burn test: write a few files to a blank CD/DVD with Windows or another burner program to verify the drive actually burns. Use a fresh, high-quality blank and set the burn speed to the lowest supported (slower = more reliable).
  • Run the Acer recovery utility with full privileges (right-click -> Run as administrator), close antivirus and any other optical-burning utilities, and disconnect USB sticks and external drives.

If the above doesn’t help

  • See whether the recovery tool produces an image/folder you can copy. If it does, move that image to a different PC that has a working burner and burn the discs there.
  • If the tool won’t produce usable discs, make a full backup/image of the laptop (disk-clone or image tool) before wiping — that preserves everything even if recovery media creation fails. Tools that create a raw image/clone will work even when the OEM utility does not.

Last-resort options and cautions

  • If the recovery partition is gone or the OEM tool is irretrievable, order official recovery media from Acer or reinstall from retail Windows media using the COA key on the laptop. Keep drivers handy before wiping.
  • Do not proceed with a full wipe until a backup or valid reinstall path is secured.

These steps will narrow whether the problem is hardware (burner/media), software (permissions/conflicts), or missing/corrupt recovery data.

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Member Avatar for Smiggly

I have my girl friend's laptop which is a Acer travelmate 2420, and it's running Windows XP OS. She wants me to wipe out the hard drive and reinstall windows for her, but she doesn't have an OS install disk or a recovery disk. Is there a way for me to make a recovery disk?

Nevermind, I dug a little bit more into the computer and found out how to make the disks using empowering technology. But now I have a different problem, when I am making the system image I get stuck at making the actual disks. When I press the next button it stops working and the button stays highlighted.

Edited by Smiggly because: n/a
Member Avatar for tje210

is the computer running a lot of stuff? what are you writing the image to? is the target disk big enough? is any part of the source drive encrypted? is there anything that sets it apart from an unused version of that laptop? silly questions, but those are what you have to ask, because that imaging program was meant to work on most computers. gotta figure out what makes yours special.

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