hi i have been trying to find a way round to formatting the hard drive on a friends laptop, i offered my services as i have done quite a few now, and i was doing it as a favour, however i cant seem to get past a problem, I insert the recovery discs as told to in the documentaion supplied with the laptop, but i keep getting an error message, Error #1822 no partition selected, do i have to set a partion in the bios settings? i cant find any solution. Please help me resolve this problem, so my mate will continue to be my mate lol. bear in mind hes my only friend Ta! Ian

Insert an XP cd into the pc and then format the drive. or take the drive out of the laptop and install it onto your desktop pc (with and ide converter or sata leads) or an external usb caddie and then format it. Thanks Frank

This is the acer page with instructions on recovery: http://www.acersupport.com/notebook... But I think your problem is the orignal partition configuration has been changed: http://translate.google.com/transla... (translated from French) The fellow there has 3 partitions--an EISA configuration partition and a C: and D: drive. The EISA partition is hidden and not to be messed with. The other 2, he believes, were created with partition magic. I'm guessing the recovery disk doesn't know if it should use C: or D: and apparently after giving the 1822 error it reverts to the previous screen with no option to select the partition. But if you can figure out a way to specify the partition/drive choose C:. If not you may need to remove C: and D: with fdisk or a third party partitioning tool. Make sure you don't delete the EISA partition. Once you remove C: and D: you should be left with unpartitioned space. Try running the recovery again. It should have the ability to set up that space. If the above doesn't work or you're not sure about it you should probably try to contact acer support.

thanks DAVE ill try that if i can figure it out, the only other problem now is i cant get the acer travelmate to accept the fdisc, as i cant find it in dos format to put onto a disc as the laptop does not have a floppy drive, i think i gotta try and find an iso image of fdisk, but i aint entirely sure, Thanks again tho, really helpful advice

just thought i would let you know the latest, i downloaded a program called Sdisc whicj allowed me to make a bootable cd with partition management, seems there was an error with partitioning, dont know what as of yet, so i removed all partitions, as all i could see was 1, installed the software as the recovery disc suggests and all is ok so far. at least the disc is installing now, & is now installed. Thanks for the help chaps & chapesses

We're glad it seems to be working out. It's possible there was no EISA partition if the partitions had already been changed. Or the restore disks may recreate it if necessary.