Hello I have just joined up after giving up the futile attempts to use the recovery disk supplied with the system. Thank you for this wonderful resource as I read many of the postings before joining and I know my technical capability is WAY below most people here.

The model is A65-S126. What occured is the computer was running very slow. It is not my computer and the person who was using it had NO virus or spy ware software loaded. So rather than try to remove all that I decided to initilize the hard drive and let the system recover disk do its thing.

I have done this same operation before on my laptops and desktops and never had a problem. The worst is for it to happen on a computer that is not mine.

Something went haywire, I followed the instructions carefully and now what I get on the screen is after booting up on the recovery disk and selecting ANY of the options I get Error: 120000001 The size of the hard disk is unacquirable. Then nothing else happens.

Appreciate ANY help.

I would try a regular Xp cd or another recovery disk. How old is the hard drive? Could be bad also but try a different recovery disk first. You could download and burn an Ultimate Boot CD from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and boot the computer off of it and run a hard drive test, then a memory test and a virus scan to narrow down the problem. If the computer had a nasty virus it could have infected the boot sector of the hard drive making it unbootable. If that is the case then you need to remove the virus and fix the boot sector using the FIXBOOT command from a bootable disk like the recovery console of Windows XP. Keep us advised of your progress!!