The grass is dry. I always mow in late morning after the morning dew has evaporated. I spoke to the shop concerning the installation of the last drive disk and they stated that the clearances were met. My guess is that the drive disk which seems to be made from plastic and not rubber may be part of the problem. When the mower had the symptoms last, I stood the mower on end and the rotor disk was very hot and the drive disk was very pliable. Maybe the contact material on the drive disk is getting too hot to have enough friction on the spinning rotor.

My goodness gracious, this really isn't that complicated. If you suspected a bad drive, what you should have done is determined the manufacturer of the drive and downloaded the manufacturers diagnostic utility. If it reported errors, replace the drive (perhaps under warranty) if not, look elsewhere for the source of trouble. As it appears you replaced the original drive, the new drive is blank and has no operating system hence the error message. You have four choices: Reinstall the original drive and run the appropriate diagnostic utility to see if the drive is actually failing. Leave the new drive in place and reinstall the operating system via the supplied recovery disc which will return the computer as it was when you first opened the box. Once that's up and running, get all the Windows updates and install any software you'd like to use. Of course, you'll loose any data on the old drive. You do not need to download any drivers first unless you've made big hardware changes to the computer. "Big" changes would most likely be video or sound cards. Use the original drive to make a clone (exact copy) of the drive contents on the new drive. Every drive manufacturer includes the necessary software and instructions in the package or makes it available as a free download from their website. While this method will preserve your son's data, if the problem wasn't the drive but rather, say, some corruption in Windows, those problems will continue. Leave the new drive in place and reinstall the old drive. Run the recovery disc, installing Windows to the new drive. As described above, get Windows updates and reinstall any software. Selectively copy data files from the old drive to the new drive. If the diagnostic software indicates impending failure, do this part quickly. Let us know how you want to proceed and if you need additional instructions.

Your post reminds me how out of touch I have become with this kind of problem (and I am just posting about a possible win install too). However like you, I remember some things from my past and I suspect that your problem is probably a simple fix. At least for the time being, I think reinstalling windows is extreme and since you have a second working computer you should wait for some of these other clever folks to help. I'll bet there is some utility to help with this but if not, there must be a way to mnually link particular extensions to specific programs, and for the time being you would probably only need to make a couple of links (but don't ask me how).

I am using DVD+R to reuse one I have, looking in my physical file I see I have 5 new ones that don't need to be erased. Still I wonder. I purchased these back in 2007, progress may have left them behind. The label is: DVD RW, DVD+R I should be able to read and write, hum, doesn't say erasable. The mfg is Memorex and proudly proclaims: Recordable, Enregistrable and Grabable the last two of which I have no clue to the meaning. I think I may have purchased them for use in a DVD audio/video recorder.. but that is digital too. I am pretty sure I can stick in my DVD player/recorder (not on the computer) and erase/overwrite..not sure I want to got to the trouble to check. Thanks for the link to third party DVD software. I'll look there but most likely will just use a new DVD. It lists a 4.7 GByte capacity. Does newer technology hold more? I think the Toshiba script talked about 4.7 GByte (may be the standard still) and two DVDs.