Finally figured it out
My last ditch attempt was to put the laptop hard drive into another computer. I managed to get an install, but when I replaced the hard drive I saw a blue screen of death! Luckily I still had the old ACER install disks. These installed fine, but would not boot on the other laptop but ................worked when I swapped the drives around!
Thanks for all the help along the way guys
BTW the CD/DVD drive is working (sometimes) but still does not show up in the BIOS. Weird