Acer Recovery CD Error 0xd0000017
I’m writing this in the hopes that it eases the pain of others. You see, it took an annoying amount of web searching to find a satisfying resolution to all my woes. Let me explain…no, there isn’t enough time….let me sum up. The controller, or possibly a motor, went bad on my desktop’s hard drive. After spending a full day desperately trying to resuscitate it, I put in a new hard drive, but I didn’t have a Vista installation disc handy, so I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Now, I could have tried using Ubuntu on my main desktop, I guess, except for one thing. Mitch Hedberg once said “A mini bar is a machine that makes everything expensive.” As much as I have used and loved Linux, I must confess– it’s an OS that makes everything incompatible. Case and point– it didn’t work with my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Both of them have a power-saving feature where they shut off until an I/O event, at which point they re-partner. The Bluetooth system on Ubuntu wasn’t up to the task. Besides that, I can’t run Adobe CS4 on Linux.
Anyway, I had to re-order the system recovery discs from Acer. I popped them in and let them get to work, only to fail with the well-documented “Error: 0xd0000017″. Of course, everyone knows what this hex number means, so I’ll just get on with it. Actually, I’m lying. Nobody knows. I sure didn’t.
Error 0xd0000017 is basically an Acer recovery CD complaint that means “Waaaah! This drive has stuff on it! I can’t handle this!” You very likely will experience this problem if you use these discs to replace a Linux install. So, what to do? Well, grab a handy Ubuntu CD or, in my case, USB stick. You need to do this so that your root file system is not your hard drive. Then, from there, you’re free to blow away your hard drive’s contents. I only have the one drive, so it’s easy to find — /dev/sda. A full wipe was thus easy to do with the following command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
Note that that’s /dev/sda and not /dev/sda1. Blow everything away, including the partition information. After that, the Acer disks will run just fine.
I should note that this is a fairly slow process, however. It took nearly 24 hours to clean out a 1.5 TB disc. If anyone has advice on how that can go faster, please feel free to mention it in the comments.
Terry Said,
May 1, 2009 @ 7:36 pm
A quicker way to solve the problem and it only takes like 10 mins if you have a windows xp install disk,run your normal install,format your drive but exit befor it has a chance to install then reboot with your recovery disk in and all is good to go!
Rhett Said,
May 3, 2009 @ 11:14 pm
Interesting point to note, Terry. Of course, I didn’t have XP media or any other, for that matter, which required resorting to more…crude…means.
DIM Said,
July 29, 2009 @ 8:25 am
and what about if the permission denied when typed dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda ?
Rhett Said,
July 29, 2009 @ 10:40 am
DIM, you need to do that with root privileges, so try putting “sudo” at the beginning of the command.
Jeff Said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
If only you had a friend who used to do SCSI drivers and performance analysis for large scale disk systems on unix.
Oh wait..that’s me.
Next time, try using the bs (block size) option for dd.
If I remember right, dd will default to 512 byte block operations..VERY slow, because you have a high protocol to data ratio. Modern media should accept very large “blocks”, and will break it up as needed..so go for a nice meg or so. It makes a huge difference.
Oh..and you might be able to just get rid of the partition table.
Hugh in downtown London, England Said,
August 21, 2009 @ 8:30 am
Genius! Thanks Rhett.
Been challenged by this for ages. This post “showed me the way”.
As someone said “you need several computers to fix one broken one” but the quick and apparently straightforward way is to download the Ubuntu netbook remix or similar onto a USB stick. Boot from that. It includes Partition Editor. Run it from Administration. Delete the primary partition AND reformat as FAT32.
Now boot from your Acer recovery media and ‘Voila!’. I can now flog my laptop with confidence and get something with a built in webcam (major deficiency of an otherwise excellent laptop).
Justin Said,
October 19, 2009 @ 11:56 am
Thanks Rhett! One thing to add – If you just delete the partition (with whatever method you prefer) the Acer recovery will create a new one for you. No format is necessary.
Tim Said,
January 8, 2010 @ 6:18 pm
So what am i supposed to do to get rid of the error in order to re-instal my system disk?
Rhett Said,
January 8, 2010 @ 6:52 pm
Tim,
Please look at the 4th paragraph from the bottom and continue from there. The process is to boot from a linux live CD or USB stick, get a shell, and use dd to erase everything on the disk. You can add “bs=512M” to the end to make it go faster.
ive Said,
August 10, 2010 @ 8:29 am
and what if it asks an password in the terminal window?
don’t now what that is:p
Rhett Said,
August 13, 2010 @ 9:58 pm
I’m guessing you’re being asked for your root password? I can’t tell you what that is.