[vggarcia]

I recently acquired an Aspire laptop which the former owner had installed Linux on, removing the original Vista OS it came with. I ordered restoration discs to go back to the factory defaults and OS, but when I loaded the restore discs and the machine attempted to boot, I got the notorious "Loading stage 1.5.GRUB loading, please wait...Error 17"

Laptop then locks up

I was going to try the auto detect hard drive trick, but for the life of me, I don't see an option TO auto detect the hard drive in the bios (or to set it at AUTO)!

I'm stuck at this point. Can anyone advise me on how to get the thing back to its original factory state, and lose this Ubuntu error (and Ubuntu program if it's not factory)? I'm generally computer illiterate, so simple answers/directions are appreciated

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Rip all of the partitions out. You may need another computer to do this with. Then run the recovery CDs again.

[Neil Jones]

Rip all of the partitions out. You may need another computer to do this with. Then run the recovery CDs again.

[vggarcia]

Rip all of the partitions out. You may need another computer to do this with. Then run the recovery CDs again.

Thanks for the reply. Can you tell me how I would do that, and how a second computer would aid in doing it since the thing won't boot? thx

[Neil Jones]

Connect the hard drive to another computer as a secondary drive.
Then under XP or Vista or Windows 7 RC1 you can go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disk Management and remove all the partitions from your now secondary drive.