Partitioning Acer L460G Was A Big Mistake!

Hello I have an Acer L460G with pre-loaded Windows 7 Starter. I bought it from a friend and the Warranty transferred with it. I quickly upgraded it to Windows 7 Enterprise, because I like that platform and am familiar with it. But when it loaded I got a blank screen after logging in and after research realized that explorer.exe was missing and created a temporary work around to get the desktop visual. I figured I go back to when I had the other things done that I want to do.

I was planning on using the PC as A Serve to host my websites and mail. So I got a copy of Windows 8 that I would experiment with and proceeded to partition the hard-drive in order to install it. The installation went according to plan, but I quickly realized that Windows 8 is not the program I wanted

I went back to the Windows 7 OS and left the Windows 8 alone for now. This is where all the troubles began to show themselves.

1. explorer.exe refuses to stay where its supposed to and keep disappearing
2. I cannot activate the product because of this
3. I eased the copy of Windows 8 and caused myself more grief.
4. I am unable to restore to factory specs or get it to boot to my recovery disk

After all of the research that I've done on this Acer I've come to realize they really set up this system to be only as it is released from the factory and to get it back to the factory spec's is burdensome.

I want to know can I just erase the entire hard drive and set things up the way in which I had intended and if so what are the steps I need to take? I really don't want factory specs on this PC.

There is probably more info you need from so I ready to assist.

Thank you

 

What I would do in your situation

1. download Parted Magic and make a bootable disk; see docs at http://partedmagic.com/doku.php
2. use the Parted Magic disk to delete the partitions, then create and format one primary partition
3. install Windows 7 Enterprise on the new partition

 

I would follow pwillener's advice, except the last step, i would let the windows 7 enterprise installer do its own partioning and setup. Had better luck letting windows do its own formating/drive setup.

 

Good suggestion! :cool