Windows fails to start on Acer computer. Help

[Lester]

Hi all,

This morning my wife went to start up her Acer laptop; but windows failed to start. It says to insert windows installation disc, restart computer and repair. But can't get it to go to the DVD drive.

File that is corrupt is; File:\windows\system 32\drivers\volsnap.sys

Thanks for you help.

[bert (Brett)]

Lester,

I lot of the new laptops have the windows installation disc as a partition on the hard drive, and you can install windows from the other partition.

On a acer I just worked on the command to go into the partition was from memory, ctrl f10 at the start screen.

Brett

[Lester]

Hi Brett,

she is getting the acer screen which tells her to press F2 for set up, then it goes to windows error recovery screen. She cannot get to the start up menu.

[bert (Brett)]

On the Laptop I used, the acer screen where it says to press f2 is the start up screen. Check the manual to make sure it is ctrl f10.

Brett

[Lester]

Cannot find the manual. Looks like we may have to take it to a computer doctor.

Thanks for your help Brett.

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

Hang on. Let me just make sure I'm understanding you.

1) have you tried a safe boot? Hold down the F8 key when Windows is starting up. You might have a Function button on your laptop, so you might have to turn that on before the F8 button does anything.

2) Do you actually have a Windows installation CD/DVD?

3) If it's a "no" to 2), there is almost certainly an installation image on the hard drive. You should have been prompted to burn said image to disk when you initially set everything up. If you didn't...tsk tsk.

4) if the answer to 2) is yes, then you probably need to go into the Laptop's bios and set the boot mode to cd/DVD drive as the first bootable option. This should allow you to boot from the CD/DVD. From there, you should be able to do a repair installation, which should fix the issue.

Can you please advise of the model of the Acer laptop. If I know that, I can hopefully hunt down a user guide from Acer's website.

Have you tried ringing Acer?

Dave

[Lester]

Hi Dave,

We cannot boot in safe mode, and cannot boot from the DVD drive. On checking the windows disk it is for another acer computer, not the one that is giving trouble.

The model of the Acer laptop is; Aspire 5720G

Have not tried ringing Acer yet.

If you could find a user guide that would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[White Rabbit]

Have you went into the bios and changed the boot priority? You need to set the dvd to be the first device that is scanned on start up.

[Analog6 (Odille)]

I just tried to get onto the Acer Australia support site to see if they had one and it would not open at all!

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

OK - did you ever get prompted to burn a recovery disk with said laptop? I have yet to see a laptop not offer this option during setup, but I haven't seen every single laptop model on the market. The other installation CD/DVD is probably not much good, since these recovery images are custom images with drivers for the relevant model etc.

As to booting from the CD/DVD drive - did you go into the bios and set the cd/dvd drive as the first bootable option? I'm not sure what key you need to press to get into the bios on your acer, laptop manufacturers seem to hate standards (which is why I dislike laptops immensely).

Acer's website does not load. Whoever looks after their website should be shot, that's inexcusable for a large organisation. Wait till Monday, ring them and then chastise them for their website not loading. The address is resolving, so it's not a DNS issue, and telnet to their IP address on port 80 is also resolving (but not giving me a greet). I'd say that they're probably running .aspx code and they've screwed it up. I've tried to manually go to index.html/htm/asp/aspx (and also for default.html etc) without any luck, I just get an invalid page error from the Acer parent site. Not a good site.

Dave

Originally Posted by Lester

Hi Dave,

We cannot boot in safe mode, and cannot boot from the DVD drive. On checking the windows disk it is for another acer computer, not the one that is giving trouble.

The model of the Acer laptop is; Aspire 5720G

Have not tried ringing Acer yet.

If you could find a user guide that would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Lester]

Thanks for your help everyone. Have been into the bios and changed startup to DVD drive, but since then have found out the discs are not the ones for this laptop.

Cannot get to the partition; as we don't know the correct key to press.

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

I managed to get the manual from the US Acer site. 1.8mb download.
Here's a section on recovery.

Restore and recovery

The restore and recovery features allow you to restore or recover the system
from a factory default image, from a user created image, or from previously
created CD and DVD backups. You can also reinstall applications and drivers for
your Acer system.
1 Press <Alt> + <F10> or select Acer eRecovery Management from the
Empowering Technology toolbar to start Acer eRecovery Management.
2 Switch to the restore and recovery page by selecting the Restore button.
3 Select the backup point you would like to restore from. You can also
choose to recover the system from a factory default image, recover from a
previously created CD/DVD or reinstall applications and drivers.
4 Follow the instructions on screen to complete the process.

Hope this helps
Bill

[Lester]

Hi Bill, thanks a heap for that the Alt + F10 was the trick. Except my wife hadn't done a back up for the last 12 months and lost our financials.

Just goes to emphasise the Importance of backing up, doesn't it.

All the best and thanks again to all.

[Glenhuon (Bill)]

Glad I could help Lester. Yep, ya gotta do those backups of the important stuff, learned that the hard way too.

Cheers
Bill