Aspire thumb drive recovery failed

I bought my son an Aspire V5 and, after a couple of months, it wouldn't boot to windows. After consulting with acer help and the store where I bought the laptop, I ordered the thumb drive that was supposed to return the machine to factory settings. When it got here and I installed as per directions, the install hung up while extracting one of the ISO files. Let it sit for weeks while it was "extracting", restarted it, even tried putting the files on a different thumb drive and running it and no luck. The first steps (wiping the HDD, setting up the partition etc.) all seems to go fine. Now the HDD has been wiped and I can't seem to get any where. Any help would be most appreciated.

Accepted answers

brbonn

So I followed the steps that JordanB listed in his link. I created the bootable USB drive, cleaned the HD and still couldn't get the recovery thumb drive to work. I then cleaned the HD again and tried to load Windows 8.1 directly from the bootable USB drive. It failed at random points over several attempts and I also noticed a strange warning that "this drive may be about to fail". I took the hard drive out of the laptop and loaded it into a gigaware HDD enclosure, cleaned it again from my desktop, created a simple partition and assigned it a drive number. I started loading files on to the drive to test it and it started dropping out randomly. I then went and bought a new HD, installed it and used the bootable USB drive to load Windows 8.1 (the recovery drive loaded all the files and asked for a reboot, but couldn't find a file after the reboot). The machine is back up and running and I have loaded all the updates and drivers required.

Long story short, I had a bad HDD. Still don't know what the problem is with it but don't much care either.

Thanks for the help guys, much appreciated.

All comments

IronFly

i suggest you to create a bootable USB or CD media from Hiren's boot cd .iso

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

boot from the media and start MiniXP

once booted, double click command prompt

type

diskpart

type

list disk

type

select disk 0

(i suppose you have only 1 HDD on your system)

type

clean

type

exit

now your HDD is completly wiped, exit from mini-xp and boot from your recovery media.

if it still fails, i would contact the Acer support service to have another USB recovery media.

brbonn

Just got back from an overseas assignment. This laptop is essentially a brick. I tried your suggestions but it still won't restore. I guess I will try to get Acer to send me another recovery drive but my frustration level is pretty high. My son got this computer over a year ago and got about 3 months of use out of it. Thanks for the help anyway.

JordanB

http://community.acer.com/t5/Software-Solutions-and/Acer-S7-392-Factory-Image/m-p/362689#U362689

JordanB

Follow the 14 steps in link above. And it will work.

IronFly

Can be a faulty USB recovery media, i would contact the Acer support service.

brbonn

So I followed the steps that JordanB listed in his link. I created the bootable USB drive, cleaned the HD and still couldn't get the recovery thumb drive to work. I then cleaned the HD again and tried to load Windows 8.1 directly from the bootable USB drive. It failed at random points over several attempts and I also noticed a strange warning that "this drive may be about to fail". I took the hard drive out of the laptop and loaded it into a gigaware HDD enclosure, cleaned it again from my desktop, created a simple partition and assigned it a drive number. I started loading files on to the drive to test it and it started dropping out randomly. I then went and bought a new HD, installed it and used the bootable USB drive to load Windows 8.1 (the recovery drive loaded all the files and asked for a reboot, but couldn't find a file after the reboot). The machine is back up and running and I have loaded all the updates and drivers required.