Weird Hard Drive/Computer Problems
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Posted by Andy on October 6, 2007, 8:15 pm
Please log in for more thread options Ok, I'd like to state that I have been working in the computer industry for almost a decade now...first help desk...then computer technician..then network Admin...finally Network Engineer.....Not that this is important but I wanted to establish that I am at least somewhat well versed in fixing stuff and don't need advice like (Did you make sure it's plugged in. ;) ) I've been wrestling with this thing for a week and have tried a lot of things. Let me try to lay the situation out. I have an Acer Aspire 5100 notebook. I recently began to notice it performing poorly. I had run chkdsk before and found nothing, but I finally saw in the Event Viewer that bad sectors were detected. I started backing my stuff up but the disk access is slow and I had a lot to back up. My intention was to try to force a Ghost image using Symantec Ghost and the -fro switch. Work became really busy and I have too many programs I need on this thing to have time to reload at the present. A big problem arose when I started to have to keep the unit on all the time because it was very difficult to get it to boot again. I would get the blue screen of death and an "Invalid_Partition" error when I would try to boot. If I kept at it, eventually the thing would (And still does!) Boot. I eventually backed up all my data and tried to take an image of a partition on the drive. I could never get the entire disk.....Ghost would fail out. I figured that would suit me fine. Dumped the image down to a new laptop hard drive... And I get NTLDR not found. If I plug that drive with the ghosted partition into another laptop, It begins to boot. I booted to the recovery console anyway and ran fixmbr, fixboot, chkdsk, bootcfg, and checked my boot INI. The Parameters were (0) (0) (0) (1) (1 for the partition. I forgot what the others are. Rdisk...disk.....). Since there is only one drive on this laptop and one partition on the drive it seemed like it should be fine. Finally I gave up on the whole ghosting scheme. I'd have to suck it up and reload a ton of software. I tossed in a different drive (Which I formatted repeatedly and ran several chkdsk's) and started to reinstall the Operating System. I could never get the install to finish. Sometime during Windows Install the computer would simply shut down. I never caught a glimpse of any type of BSOD or anything...it would just go down. I'd have to unplug the power to get it to boot. Tried a different drive. Same Result. I assumed there must be another problem...perhaps with the Motherboard, RAM, or CPU but here I am...typing this on the laptop booted to Windows with the Hard Drive with bad sectors after letting it try to boot 12 times before it came up. Why does this computer shut down when another HDD is put in and I try to load Windows on it? Why will my images boot on other laptops but not boot on this one? Why can I boot "On Occasion" with the bad drive? I just have no idea what is going on at this point. Any comments are welcome. I've tried a lot of different stuff and am just frustrated. The Unit is under warranty but Acer makes ME pay the shipping and I really can't afford to be without it for the three weeks they said I would be. If it's a HDD problem...I don't care I have 10 Spare Laptop Drives. If it is something else, I would have to suck it up. Suggestions where I don't have to reboot the computer are most welcome. ;) | |||||||||||||
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Posted by Gerard Bok on October 7, 2007, 7:51 am
Please log in for more thread options > I have an Acer Aspire 5100 notebook.
>And I get NTLDR not found.
>there is only one drive on this laptop and one partition on the drive
>it seemed like it should be fine. No. On ACER laptops, expect 3 partitions on the drive. Two of which are visible: C: for Windows, D: for your data. A small third one contains the recovery data. >I could never get the install to finish. Sometime during Windows
>Install the computer would simply shut down. I never caught a glimpse >of any type of BSOD or anything...it would just go down. In that case: read the manual :-) As in: you can instruct Windows to create a logfile for it's installation attempts. It works 2 ways: Windows will use the information in a second attempt to install, just to avoid a known pitfall. And you can read the log yourself and see what Windows Installer was doing when the PC crashed. >I assumed there must be another problem...perhaps with the
>Motherboard, RAM, or CPU but here I am...typing this on the laptop >booted to Windows with the Hard Drive with bad sectors after letting >it try to boot 12 times before it came up. My suggestion would be to run MEMTEST86 first. http://memtest86.com/ (free download !!) Create a bootCD and boot from it. It will tell you if the basic hardware of your laptop is sound. If there is a problem with your Ram (timing) or CPU, it is likely to show here. Next thing would be to grab a 'no install OS disk' like Knoppix (http://knoppix.net/) or BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) That will exercise (almost) your entire laptop, without having to rely on either your local harddisk or your Windows files. You could probably even use this and try to salvage whatever is still present on your local harddisk. -- Kind regards, Gerard Bok | |||||||||||||
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