Thanks Greg & Ignatz,
After aprox 1 month finally up and running with windows 7. Solved it before reading your replies but many thanks. Heres what I did in case someone is interested. After attempting fix using bootable windows sytem repair disk, going into command prompt and trying to fix Mbr (unsuccessfully) I decided to wipe the drive completely using KillDisk on my ultimate boot cd. Did it twice and then PCsweep once. Made sure the 289.8 mb partition was completely wiped. Acer had told me to wipe ONLY the 100 mb partition which I did and that ended up causing all my of problems. I know now that ALL partitions must be completely wiped from the hard drive before factory recovery. Did this in the am and the recovery went flawlessly. If you guys only knew how much time and effort went into this between reading erroneous info on other forums, talking with repair experts etc, you'd appreciate where i'm coming from. I was told by so called experts that my hd was definetlly bad even though a scan said otherwise and ibuntu could load and work. I hope this info prevents anyone else having this problem from going through the mill as I have done.
Joe