Major laptop problem

[Hom3r]

I have an Acer Aspire 5680 laptop, which was on FAT 32.

Last night I converted it to NTFS, which worked ok.

But now it boots and freezes shortly after boot up, if you move the mouse over the time the hour glasss symbol appears and the start button doesn't work, even CTRL, ALT & DEL does SFA.

Can I find the recovery disks that I made so I can try a possible repair? no.

Is there anything I can do?

I can get into bios and get it to boot from a CD/USB etc.

Would the Acer site be worth looking through?

[qasdfdsaq]

Depends what your priority is and what you want to do - is there data on there you need to get off, or do you just want to reinstall windows and wipe the thing?

It's easy enough to get Vista/Win7 onto a USB drive if you have another computer handy (which I assume you do, since you're posting on here), XP not so easy as the discs are a lot more specific.

you should be able to get into recovery without discs

[vanman]

look here
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...t/nostart.mspx

and here

http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/xphome.html

[v0id]

Originally Posted by ooogemaflop

you should be able to get into recovery without discs

Yes, you press Alt+F10 at the 'Acer' boot screen ...that is unless they've deleted the recovery partition to reclaim disk space, or (as it's a 4 year old laptop model) upgraded to Vista/Windows 7 which would have merged the 'hidden' partitions into the primary one.

[Hom3r]

I tried the boot from last known working but still no luck, and I cannot use the XP repair disc as there isn't one.

I found the discs I created when I first bought the lappy, but it will only wipe and start again so I am copying what I can to an external drive.

---------- Post added at 14:04 ---------- Previous post was at 14:02 ----------

Originally Posted by v0id

Yes, you press Alt+F10 at the 'Acer' boot screen ...that is unless they've deleted the recovery partition to reclaim disk space, or (as it's a 4 year old laptop model) upgraded to Vista/Windows 7 which would have merged the 'hidden' partitions into the primary one.

Will try this when I've finished copying data, I have the Vista P:remium upgrade which came free but never installed it.

If I have to restart should I upgrade to vista?

---------- Post added at 14:18 ---------- Previous post was at 14:04 ----------

Alt F10 had no repair option so I'm doing a factory reset.

Originally Posted by v0id

Yes, you press Alt+F10 at the 'Acer' boot screen ...that is unless they've deleted the recovery partition to reclaim disk space, or (as it's a 4 year old laptop model) upgraded to Vista/Windows 7 which would have merged the 'hidden' partitions into the primary one.

in my experience the recovery partitions are left cuz they are not hidden when you run installation

[Hom3r]

I'm back up and running, just uninstalling all the crap that came with it, Norton, AOL etc.

Should I upgrade to Vista Premium or leave it at XP MCE?

leave it

[qasdfdsaq]

I'd suggest upgrading it to Windows 7 if you have that option, Vista is (in most people's opinions) a steaming pile of you know what

[Hom3r]

4 hours in and not scratched the surface of what I need to find and reinstall

---------- Post added at 18:38 ---------- Previous post was at 18:33 ----------

I've just noticed that the factory reset and put the c drive back to FAT32, I wonder if the convert to NTFS went wrong?

[qasdfdsaq]

The factory reset normally reformats the drive as part of the process, hence will have reformatted it as FAT32 regardless of what it was before.

[Mick Fisher]

Out of the box my Acer Aspire (can't remember model) had a bad/unreadable cluster on it's HDD.

Prior to discovering this, I couldn't get ESET to complete a scan although other AV's had no problem plus among other issues Acronis mostly (but not always) failed to make a image.

Trying to research the issue I came across a mammoth thread at Wilder's about the same issue that had been running for ages without ESET support solving it. As the majority of complaints were about Acers, I now wonder if, somehow or the other, a batch of Acer machines were/are? suffering from the same issue.

Just wondering if you should run chkdsk before trying to convert to NTFS again?

Hmmm...Just remembered my attempt to upgrade from vista to 7 failed big time. Maybe my bad cluster had a hand in that? I guess I should try the upgrade (or maybe just reinstall) again sometime now it's fixed.

[Hom3r]

6 hours in and I'm getting tired of XP updates 137 so far.

Close to calling it a night, and having a very large vodka.

[Shaggy]

When you make the recovery discs with Acer the original is deleted automatically to make more space.