Notebooks & Netbooks

[freewithEFT]

For quite a while, I was getting the "no bootable device" error & the hard drive was not listed in the BIOS. I couldn't access erecovery with alt + F10 and I have no idea where the recovery disk is since I moved. After fiddling with connections, hard drive is listed but getting same error. When I start erecovery, it starts to load, then I get "please wait a moment" and it sits there. Been 20 minutes so far this time. I can hear the hard drive working. Any ideas? Thanks!

[dinsdale · Accepted solution]

Sounds like a failing hard drive. If you have access to a PC you can remove the drive from the laptop and connect to the PC with standard SATA power and data cables to save as much of your personal data as possible. An external USB caddy will do the same job. 

If you fit a new drive you'll need an Acer recovery disk to use the existing OEM licence key as a retail Windows disc won't accept it. Not a problem with Linux of course. The recovery disk won't restore the hidden recovery partition though. It won't help if the failure is in the drive's control board but if the problem is caused by sector errors you might be able to patch the drive temporarily by using Spinrite from https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm although it's an expensive gamble at $89.

The program tries to relocate data from damaged sectors. If it's successful the drive will work normally again but that's just an opportunity to use an imaging program like Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost etc. to clone all the partitions to another drive. With luck you'll have your existing data, OS and recovery partitions working safely on a new drive but there's a risk of wasting time and the $89 if there's too much physical damage or the fault is in the control board. 

[freewithEFT]

Wow, thanks for all the detailed info. Now to decide if I want to spend that much on the attempt to fix it...