[Foster Wagensomer]

Hello! Looking for some help. So I've finally decided to try and restore my laptop that died on me about 2 years ago. A little bit of backstory, the original problem was a repair loop caused when my battery charger crapped out while booting up. I bought another charger and tried to repair it, but I never got anywhere and then that charger ended up crapping out as well so I gave up.

 

Computer is an ASUS U52f running Windows 7 professional 64 bit.

 

Anyway here I am now. I bought a new charger and the computer turns on. Windows starts up and proceeds to boot up to a windows wallpaper with a Command Prompt box. I am unable to type anything into this box. I have tried to boot into safe mode, but I get the same Command Prompt only against a black screen. Attached is what comes up when windows boots.

 

The laptop worked great just before all this happened, and I have files I would like to be able to access so I'm really hoping to fix it. Please let me know if there is anything you need from me.

 

Thank you! 

Attached Thumbnails

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It says it's using x:\ if I read the text at the top of the window correctly.

 

Is there a DVD or USB that it is trying to boot from?

 

If you just want access you can download Hiren's Boot CD:

 

 

http://www.hirensboo...BootCD.15.2.zip

 

Download, save and then right click on it and Extract All.  Click on BurnToCD.cmd and follow the instructions to burn the CD.  Then move the CD to the sick PC and boot off the CD. (You may need to change the boot order so the CD drive comes before the hard drive.  See: http://www.hirensboo...-order-in-bios/ )

Boot into MiniXP 

[RKinner]

It says it's using x:\ if I read the text at the top of the window correctly.

 

Is there a DVD or USB that it is trying to boot from?

 

If you just want access you can download Hiren's Boot CD:

 

 

http://www.hirensboo...BootCD.15.2.zip

 

Download, save and then right click on it and Extract All.  Click on BurnToCD.cmd and follow the instructions to burn the CD.  Then move the CD to the sick PC and boot off the CD. (You may need to change the boot order so the CD drive comes before the hard drive.  See: http://www.hirensboo...-order-in-bios/ )

Boot into MiniXP 

[Foster Wagensomer]

It does say x:\ and I do recall that before I gave up a long time ago it was telling me to boot from a disc. I am unaware if is still trying to. A friend gave me a boot up disc but it turned out to be 32 bit. I'll have to see if I can find a blank around and give that a shot. I'd be happy just to access it, but if It can be fully repaired I'd love to continue using it.

[RKinner]

Hiren's can also boot from a USB if your PC supports USB boots.  https://www.hiren.in...tcd-on-usb-disk

[Foster Wagensomer]

Gonna give the USB method a try. I found a flashdrive laying around and if that doesn't work I'll have to stop on the way home from work tomorrow and grab some blank cd's.

 

I'll report back. Thank you!

[Foster Wagensomer]

Alright, so I was able to boot of a USB using Hirens. This gives me hope that all is not lost, but I was unable to access anything on the hard drive in minixp. So I guess at this point, how would I go about repairing things so I can boot up normally? When I go into the Bios set up I have 3 boot options:

 

P1: HL-DT-STDVDRAM GT32N, which boots to a message that tells me to reboot and select a proper boot device or insert boot media.

 

P0: ST9640320AS, which boots to what I took a picture of in my original post.

 

and the flash drive for Hirens. 

 

Thanks in advanced!

[RKinner]

P1: is your DVD drive which has a bad rep for not working with Win 7

Problem: When upgrading to Windows 7, (32 & 64 bit versions) the optical drive/device becomes extremely unreliable and often intermittently disconnects from the system (sometimes it is not even properly displaying in both the Device Manager and in the My Computer windows). Sometimes the drive repeatedly remains inactive after a CD is inserted. Sometimes the drive is active immediately, then it disconnects, the application freezes and the system crashes. Often the disk will spin down to idle and then will disappear from the system.

Cause: There is an incompatibility issue with Windows 7.  This only happens when you upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows Vista. The drive works properly in laptops with the original system configuration of Windows Vista. Windows 7 introduced a new “Adaptive Link Power Management” (ALPM) feature which is responsible for telling the drive when not to run in order to save laptop battery power. CD/DVD Device/drives designed only for Windows Vista will have this fault when you upgrade to Windows 7.

Solution: I have found no firmware update available. I have also found a work-around involving editing the computer registry, however this disables the Adaptive Link Power Management (ALPM) feature. I am not prepared to disable this power-saving feature because this simply cures the symptoms while not fixing the underlying cause. My Acer laptop was sold to me 4 years ago with the free offer to upgrade to Windows 7. Thus, for me, this is an Acer warranty issue (even though I have only this week discovered the reason for this design fault). However, if Acer originally only provided Windows Vista for your computer, the sure way of solving the problem is to purchase a new CD/DVD Device/drive. Make sure you only purchase a drive that is described as compatible with Windows 7 and later. There are still available some brand new yet older version disc drives that are not compatible with Windows 7.

Note: ALPM (Adaptive Link Power Management) is a feature that puts a hardware device into sleep state after 100 ms of idle time. This is a power-saving feature. After you disable ALPM, you can still configure the drive to run in Power Saver plan, however, you then can no longer benefit from the additional battery power saving that is provided by ALPM.

 

 

P0 is your hard drive.  It's a Seagate and they currently have a rep for premature failure and unreliability.  If MiniXp is unable to read from the drive then the drive may be dead tho the drive must be there a bit or MiniXP doesn't run.  If I remember correctly when you boot Hirens you have an option for Gparted.  Does it see the hard drive?  

[Foster Wagensomer]

For some reason I couldn't access the hard drive in Minixp. I could see it, but if I tried to open it it wanted me to format. I tried GParted and I got in! Looks like all my stuff is there too!

 

So I guess next is to figure out why when I try to boot from the hard drive as normal, I get what is pictured in the original post.

[RKinner]

I haven't used gparted in a long time but I vaguely remember we had to go in and set a partition to active before it could be used for booting. Did you see an active partition?

 

There is a section on data recovery in the online manual for gparted:

 

http://gparted.org/d...mpt-data-rescue

 

and also an option:  

 

Checking a Partition

on

http://gparted.org/d...mpt-data-rescue

[Foster Wagensomer]

Best Answer

Great news! I went in and noticed that somehow my recovery partition was listed as the one to boot from. Changed it to my OS partition, rebooted and it took me to the startup repair. I feared that it was just gonna go back to being stuck in a boot loop. I opted to try and boot it instead of running the repair and low and behold she fired up!

 

Thank you for pointing me in the right directions RKinner! I got my computer running and learned a little bit in the process. Coming into this I didn't know anything about partitions or their involvement in booting. It's been a few years since I've had to come to forum for some help but you guys here have never let me down!

Edited by Foster Wagensomer, 26 January 2017 - 06:40 PM.

[RKinner]

Great news.  It's nice to win one for a change.