My acer aspire 5720Z will not boot up. I get a black screen that tells me I need a cd. The laptop did not come with a cd

Cynthia Warren, January 2010

There's a piece of software that runs at switch on time that sits inside special chips in the machine called the BIOS - you can set it to boot from the machine's hard disk or from somewhere else - a CD for instance.

You may (just may) have an operating system on the hard disk - if not you're a bit scuppered until you can get a CD and the OS media.

To change the boot priority go here...

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bios-boot-cdrom

Good luck...

Peccavi, January 2010