Acer Aspire One problem

madmackem

madmackem

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Bob
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My mate has dropped off his daughters netbook for me to "fix" but I cant!
He wants OS reinstalled but didnt make recovery Discs for it.The netbook boots into Windows but has been damaged by virus and I need to reinstall the OS.In Admin tools the hard drive isnt listed (not seen this before with the boot disc) I cant understand how it boots if the drive isnt present, it shows up in bios but not in device manager.

I get an error when trying to restore to factory settings - Hard drive configuration is not set to the factory default. restore aborted.
I have tried alt-F10 but that just restarts without giong to erecovery.
If I connect an external dvdrom with a copy of xp install cd I get an error that there is no hard drive present and installation cannot continue.


Its an Aspire One A0531h, Dont suppose anyone has one and they could do me a recovery disc for this one, or any Ideason how to fix it.:help:
 
Have you tried going into the BIOS and resetting all defaults? Failing that, and assuming the HDD is physically ok, I've got an Acronis image of XP for the Aspire One that I use for work sometimes that I could send to you with an Acronis boot CD.... boot from CD; swap CD for Image DVD and restore....
 
Not got one but google threw this up -"You can also go into bios and switch the hdd from asci to ide, then it will let you format. I had to use a usb cdrom to load windows xp, but it worked fine."
 
Had a not a dissimilar problem with my sons old laptop. Turned out the hard drive was a total loss, fortunately had a spare one from a previous upgrade so installed that.
I wonder if it's not a virus but a hard drive failure. Try booting from the XP disk. You need to make sure that the correct boot sequence is set in the BIOS. If it's an external CD drive you'll need to put either CD or USB device before Hard drive I suspect.

If this start up fails I would suspect the hard drive.
 
The HDD emulation type as mentioned above is definitely worth looking at.... could be set to SATA/SCSI which means that XP won't see the drive.... setting it to emulate IDE means it will. Good call....
 
An XP disc probably won't recognise the hard drive as it'll be SATA and XP is that old now that setup needs the SATA drivers so it can address the controller that the disk is on. We need to remember kids that XP is nigh on a decade old now.

As for the OS being shagged, I'm willing to bet a boot into safe mode, clear EVERYTHING from MSconfig, and a good going over with combofix will sort it. I get machines brought in all the time that look like there's no going back, and this pretty much always works.


DekHog said:
The HDD emulation type as mentioned above is definitely worth looking at.... could be set to SATA/SCSI which means that XP won't see the drive.... setting it to emulate IDE means it will. Good call....
Click to expand...

Correct. I've only seen this option available on Lenovo laptops though.
 
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Yup done a few Acer aspires. You need to change the IDE simulation to IDE instead of SATA to recover using an XP CD.

Have you tried hitting F9 on bootup. I'm pretty sure you will have a bootable recovery partition which is normaly hiden.

By the way you wouldn't notice the difference setting it to IDE in the speed th machine runs, my mate actually thought his was faster LOL.
 
Thanks for the replies guys
The recovery is alt - f10 but that just reboots and I tried the bios to default ide/ahci that just bluescreens, even in safe mode. Already disabled everything in startup, was going to take the hd out and connect it to my pc to check integrity etc but even that is a PITA.
Its running sooooo ssssllllllooooowwww I cant get malwarebytes or spybot going. but im watching george gently now so having a break. hopefully I'll get the drive out tonight.

Dekhog, I'll see how i get on tonight and get back to you if thats ok.
 
Looks like I got it sorted, managed to get a bios update on and now the recovery partition and hard drive are visible (dont know what changed), resetting to factory defaults now.

Thanks for the replies guys
 
my two lads have these acer netbooks and every now and then you have to reflash the bios or something as the will just not boot up
not sure if it is the same issue
 
After a full reinstall discovered a bootsector virus on it that was still active, removed that and its hunky dory now :-)
 
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