eRecovery fails on Aspire 5755G

Avé, all,

I have an Acer Aspire 5755G (Windows 7, i5 processor) that unaccountably failed to boot the other day, having been shut down cleanly and disconnected from AC the night before.

The boot failure message suggested that the system was unable to contact a device on the notebook but didn't say which one.

The only peripheral attached was a USB adapter for a wireless keyboard and mouse. I disconnected it and rebooted, with the same result. Couldn't even boot to safe mode.

Thinking I might be able to boot from a recovery disk, I tried Disk 1 of the eRecovery set I made when I bought the device, and managed to get into the eRecovery menu. I decided to attempt recovery, keeping my personal files intact, and ran the process, which seemed to complete successfully, then rebooted to Windows.

There was a message saying "system is starting services" which was followed by an error message saying "Windows was unable to complete installation. Setup will continue after rebooting."

Pressing Return rebooted the system into a loop of this sequence, until I just powered it off.

Last night I managed to boot to a point where I could use the onboard eRecovery set (ALT+f10 on powerup), and after running CHKDSK on my HDD, which was reported clean, I attempted the operation again, with the same results as when I used the DVD set.

At this point I'm at a loss - I don't know what caused the problem, and so I'm not certain how to go about repairing it.

If anyone out there has seen this problem and knows how to fix it, I'd appreciate any advice you might have. the notebook is less than two years old and hasn't given any trouble up to now - it'd be a shame to have to replace it...

Thanks,

Bob

Accepted answers

capt_incredible

Okay, I've got my OS back, but had to do a full factory reset using (as it turned out) eRecovery.

A colleague in work who builds and repairs laptops as part of his job plugged my HDD into a disk caddy and connected it up to a desktop so I could pull files from it, which fortunately we were able to do.

After that I told him he could go for the factory reset if necessary.

Using a Windows 7 DVD to boot the system, he got into the onboard eRecovery set and ran the second option, which reinstalled the OS and Acer-loaded utilities to their original settings.

So far, the device has been behaving itself, but I guess time will tell.

I've spent the last 24 hours reapplying Windows patches, antivirus, email and browser, but if I get a stable system it'll have been worth it.

Thanks for the suggestions and advice.

Bob

All comments

Tommy-Acer

Can you please reproduce the complete "boot failure message"?

Vince53

Captain Incredible (Cool name, by the way), I'm not sure what is causing your problem, but I'll give you two POSSIBLE solutions.

Unplug your machine and remove the battery. Hold the Power button down for 60 seconds. This will refrewsh your BIOS. Then try again. This method works about 10% of the time.

Borrow a legal copy of your operating system, put it into your DVD drive, and reboot. It should take you to a repair screen.

capt_incredible

Tommy - thanks.

Unfortunately I didn't make a note of the full message before I began the eRecovery process.

Once that had completed and the system rebooted, it just went into the loop I described, and the original message did not reappear.

I'd have taken a screen dump, but... Smiley Happy

However, following some research, I used a Windows Vista disk to see if I could boot from it, and got to an installation screen, I exited that and ejected the disk since I didn't think it would help. the system rebooted, this time to a menu that offered a Safe Mode boot.

I selected that, and Windows began to load files, but stopped with an error about a corrupt or missing file,

Windows\system32\ql40xx.sys

It wouldn't proceed beyond that, so I don't know if additional files were missing or compromised.

At this point I think I'm looking at a clean reinstall of Windows from media, unless you have any insights or suggestions?

Cheers,

Bob

capt_incredible

Hi Vince,

Thanks - I'm actually working on that at the moment...

Actually, I didn't know about the BIOS refresh, but it's certainly worth a try. However given the issues I found when I booted into safe mode (see my reply to Tommy), somehow I doubt that I'll be in the 10% on that one...

I'm going to go for a repair using an OS disk; I'll post results as they come in.

Cheers,

Bob

(The full name is Captain Incredible - Hero of Neptune, but characters were limited Smiley Happy )

capt_incredible

Okay, I've got my OS back, but had to do a full factory reset using (as it turned out) eRecovery.

A colleague in work who builds and repairs laptops as part of his job plugged my HDD into a disk caddy and connected it up to a desktop so I could pull files from it, which fortunately we were able to do.

After that I told him he could go for the factory reset if necessary.

Using a Windows 7 DVD to boot the system, he got into the onboard eRecovery set and ran the second option, which reinstalled the OS and Acer-loaded utilities to their original settings.