Acer Aspire 5551A

Bosh

Hello all, first post here so please be gentle!

I know it's unlikely but..

Does anyone by any chance have one of these and could copy the recovery disks?

Have one here thats gone south, either the recovery partition or the eRecovery is corrupted. Cannot boot into either Windows or Safe Mode, Windows starts & then brief BSOD & reboots.

Steps tried so far:

1. I can get as far as the the Acer eRecovery Management using ALT F10 and it just sits with the spinning timer, no light or disk activity

2. Using the repair option from Windows boot (as opposed to start Windows normally) gives the generic leafy Win 7 screen with cursor dead in the water, it will happily sit there for hours.

3. Tried using a Win 7 installation disk & repair but again stalls on the leafy window

4. Burnt off Windows System recovery disk and got as far as this



As you can see Windows partition size is zero It has sat spinning the wheel on this all night.

5. Tried various option on Safe Mode screen, command line prompt etc, no joy.

Needless to say recovery disk were not burnt off when machine was bought, it's still under warranty so I'm very reluctant to do a reinstall using a proper Win 7 disk.


Apologies for long winded post, but just how fecked is it?

holcus

Try to restore factory defaults in BIOS.
It looks to me like fresh windows 7 install is not even an option as you can't get through parts requiring any HDD activity. Can you run chkdsk?

Bosh

Hi Holcus,

Thanks for the very prompt reply!

When I booted from my own Win 7 installation disk the option to install was there, so I assume I could reinstall as a last resort?

The only option I can see in the BIOS regarding recovery is to enable/disable 'D2D' recovery which is Acers own recovery. It's set to enable. I wonder if disabling this and trying the Win System recovery disk would work?

How do I run chkdsk without access to the system...my DOS days are long forgotten

Thanks again,

Neil

holcus

if you disable D2D recovery you won't be able to access recovery partition but it's no harm and you will be able to reenable it later. However you should have option of restoring defaults (it's probably located under last/exit tab in BIOS) thats what I would do in the first place.

My question about chkdsk was because I wasn't sure at which point "System recovery options" screen appears. Now I know its before this one:
System_Recovery_Options.jpg

Most likelly cause is disk failure in your case but try any live Linux distros - they are free to download, easy to use and not making any changes on harddrive unless you choose install . Just burn ISO to disk and boot from it. Once in Linux see if you can access the harddrive. We might work some magic from there...

Bosh

Yeah, set the BOIS to default but no difference.

Tried disabling the D2D & booted with the System Repair, no joy.

Reckon the HDD's gone south, it's still under warranty so back she goes

I just wanted to put it put it out there, good learning exercise especially if I was missing something new or obvious.

Appreciate the help