My girlfriend's Acer Aspire 5100 series laptop (with Vista...bad) literally "all of a sudden" had problems starting. Every time the computer was started, we would see the Acer screen, and we'd hear some horribly loud beeps (uh oh).WE got an error message that said (from what I remember) Resource Conflict - PCI in slot 03. Bus: 06, Device: 04, function:00 (I don't know for sure about the bus, device, function numbers...). In the BIOS, I found that her Matshita UJ-850s DVD drive was in slot 3 (big uh oh). We were given two options: F1 to Resume, and F2 for Setup. We went into setup and restore the defaults and rebooted. Of course, we got the same error. If we pushed F1, it asked us to Start Windows Normally or run some Startup Recovery thing. The startup thing didn't really do anything, it would attempt to System Restore, but that didn't help. After trying many times to start it, it finally got to the log in screen (F1 to resume -> Start Windows Normally). We logged in, and I sent a few word documents she wanted to save to my email I checked the Device Manager, and there was an error next to the DVD drive. It said that the device had trouble starting. I disabled the device, thinking that I would update the driver later. I never ended up doing that...What I did do was insert a Windows XP disc into her DVD drive, and rebooted (her laptop is NOT fit for Vista AT ALL. I figured it would help to put XP on it). Upon reboot, I pressed a key to start setup, formatted her partition (NTFS), and began to install the OS. At 38%, it said that it could not copy some file (an executable). I tried to skip it, and every file after that would have the same error. Upon retrying the installation, it simply got stuck at "Starting Windows..." on the install screen.
I have realized that her f-ed up DVD drive probably can't read the CD or communicate it to the computer. I want to try installing XP with a flash drive...is that a good solution?
Basically I just want input as to what the problem is and what I can do. I understand it's probably a hardware issue (****.). Just throw ideas out there. She needs a computer.
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