dougalsdouble

hi its an acer aspire 3630. one day i was on the laptop and it just restarted by itself. after the first acer screen it went to a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left hand corner. This guy had a look at it and he said everything was fine i.e hardrive and that he just needed to do a system restore. I gave him the recovery discs which i had made when i got the laptop. He said he will need my windows disc aswell but i never had one because windows xp was already on the laptop when i bought it.

Hi My laptop crashed recently so I have given it to a friend of a friend along with the backup discs which i made when i got the laptop. he told me that I have lost everything on my system and that he has to do a system restore. He said he needs the windows disc I got when I bought the laptop. The problem is that windows was already on the laptop when i bought it and i dont have a disc. now he says i need to buy a new windows disc. Is this the case? or is there some way of fixing this problem without having to buy a new windows? Thanks

so can I not "slave" the old drive to my home computer?

What do you mean by this exactly?

the most recent back-up I did was in march. but my girlfriend has important projects and stuff for uni. Is there no possible way i can retrieve the data from the HD?

ok, but will this not wipe all my data from the HD?

Yes I do have the back-up discs i made when i got the laptop and yes i did save the settings after makeing the hard drive the first boot source.

I pressed f12 then a list came up. +hard drive, cd-rom/dvd drive, Floppy Devices and Network Boot. I highlighted +hard drive and pressed enter then it went to the blank screen with the flashing cursor.

Hi. Its acer model 3630 and its xp home edition

The other day my Laptop just restarted by itself but after the first Acer screen it goes to a black screen with a flashing line in the top left hand corner. When the acer screen is shown it says 'press f2 to enter setup' and 'press f12 to enter multi-boot selection screen'. I have tried both of these but i dont know what to do because i am quite a begginer. Please can anyone help!