Why doesn't my new USB recovery media work?

CharlieE

My wife's Aspire One 725 went down a couple of months ago with a bad hard drive.  Of course, I hadn't maed a recovery USB.  I finally ordered one from the Store, and tried it out tonight.  I set the boot order to USB HDD, and, well, nothing happens!  First, I see a cursor in the top left corner, and then I see the little circle of balls wait indicator, but i never get any other screen!  Could I have a bad USB media from ACER?  Could they have sent me the wrong one?  Any other ideas?

Sharanji

You may go to BIOS settings and check if the options that you have changed has been saved. Also check the new hard disk, you may clean format it and remove all the partition, keep only a single partition.

You may boot using the USB recovery media and it would automatically configure the OEM partition needed to reload windows.

 

 

Click the Kudos  to say “Thanks” for helping! select "Accept Solution" if your issue is resovled.

 

CharlieE

Actually, I don't have a new hard drive.  i need to see if the old one can be recovered and reformatted.  If it is not working, will the USB eRecovery not work?

Sharanji

It should boot from USB or list any error message.

What was the exact with the computer? How did the computer crash? Did you make any changes on the computer?

Have you tried any other  troubleshooting  steps before you got the USB recovery media?

CharlieE

Basically, it went down when my wife hit it while it was running.  (actually, she was frustrated with it, and hit the desktop next to the computer...)  I tried many troubleshooting steps, but nothing worked, it seemed like my HDD was broken, possibly an error in the boot sectors.

 

Now, I have tried changing the bios to Legacy Bios, and it looks a little different, but it still takes 10-15 minutes to come up to the 'which drive to boot from' screen, and then, after selecting USB HDD, it still takes another 30 minutes till it just seems to stop, with no other dialog from the system.

Acupro1

Almost assuredly your hard drive is bad.  You need to either pull it and attach it to another machine that has diagnostic software or you need to download a iso of a program that will make a bootable CD with diag software (Ultimate Boot CD is a goof one). 

 

Once you verify the drive is bad, you will need to replace it and make sure you restore your BIOS to factory settings then enable F12 boot in the BIOS.  If you don't, you will struggle with recovery.

 

Chris

CharlieE

Ok, I replaced the hard drive, and after a couple of hours, I now have a factory new system to work with.  Now, I have to go through the process of deleting unneeded apps and programs, and setting up all my wife's software.  Shouldn't take much more than a week or two... ;-)