Acer Aspire One will not boot after recovery on a new hard drive

[hokeypokie]

The model is 532h. The hard drive went bad so I replaced it with a brand new hard drive that's smaller in size (120GB vs original 160GB). I first cloned the recovery partition "PQSERVICE" to the new hard drive and then install it, ran alt+F10 but it shows "no bootable device". Alt + F10 worked with the old hard drive and the recovery ran fine but because the drive is bad it gave an error at the end. With the new hard drive the alt+F10 doesn't work at all. I checked in the BIOS and it's there. I changed the partition type to active but still get the same error. I finally use the recovery disk, wiped out everything and the recovery went through till the end (it said successfully) but after reboot I still get "no bootable device" error. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

 

[Combat Wombat]

Ok...so... no bootable device.. hmm..

There should be a 100Mb file as a partition that you should have grabbed too - This file stores all your boot information with windows 7, without this file it will pretend everything is correctly BIOS wise, but when it comes to loading up he OS that partition needs that smaller 100mb partition that windows 7 auto makes when first Installing the operating system.

This partition will not have a drive letter assigned because it is hidden through windows, so only some software will pick up this small 100mb windows partition, because some third party partition software finds partitions through the drive letter search script.

You can use cmd to assign this file a Drive letter, but it's easier to use better software like Partition Magic (Paid version) which I'm pretty sure picks up all partitions regardless of a driver letter.

 

[hokeypokie]

I also tried to wipe everything and copy the first 2 partitions (PQSERVICE & SYSTEM RESERVED) to no avail. Still had "no bootable device" error. If I run recovery disk on the CD then it will install as if there's no problem and when it's done and restarted, I still get the error.. Tried to clone all 3 partitions and still didn't help either.

 

[das_stig]

Does the new drive show up in the bios boot order selection?

 

[hokeypokie]

Yes it does.

 

[hokeypokie]

I also tried to create Windows 7 Repair disc (from my Windows 7 64 bit laptop) and ran at start up but when I selected to repair the partition I got an error that says it's not compatible. I read somewhere that either 32-bit or 64-bit should work fine with any of the 2. Still need help here.

 

[hokeypokie]

Update: the 64-bit repair disk doesn't work with 32-bit system. I finally got a hold of 32-bit repair disk and it went past where I got stuck before. However, the startup repair could not detect a problem.

 

[Combat Wombat]

Because it cant see the missing 100mb file that is automatically allocated when you load a OS on which has a protocol which allows a device to boot from it.

Or:

The hdd is not set to a MBR format or has failing sectors.