Windows 7 Pro can't boot on Aspire M3970.

Everything worked until a few days ago then Windows couldn't boot. Boot repair doesn't fix things.

I have restored several times from the disks I made when we got this PC. The restore seems to work but gets to a point where a 'Starting Services' message appears. Soon after that an error message appears saying that an unexpected error has occured and Windows will restart after a reboot. I reboot. Same sequence forever after that.

I can get Windows into safe mode but once out of safe mode, the same sequence happens.

I have done a chkdisk on the hard drive on another PC with no errors found.

It looks like the restore is broken but I don't have a regular Windows CD to use for repair.

This system came with Windows 7 Home Premium which I upgraded to Pro.

Another Win 7 Pro CD won't work, says wrong version of Windows, maybe because the restore went back to Home Premium.

What can I do now?

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IronFly

when you tried to restore from CD/DVD have you deleted the partitions on your HDD?

if not, i suggest you to do it using the bootable partition magic iso:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html

download the iso file and create a bootable media from it, then delete all the partition on HDD and retry to install the OS using your restore CD/DVD

Old_geek

No I didn't. I did try to restore from the hidden partition since my first message but got exactly the same result.

If I delete the partitions, that will destroy the hidden partition too which will remove the Acer restore (not that it's working anyway) which makes it very unlikely that anything will work after that.

Does the restore also restore the hidden partition?

Old_geek

Status update:

I had the restore program delete everything in the partition instead of trying to save the user programs and data which are all backed up on the NAS anyway.

This must have cleaned out whatever was causing the problem because I now am back to the original install working correctly so far. If I can find it, I will do the update to Win 7 Pro but it's not necessary since we don't have a domain controller on the network any longer.