Acer Aspire. S3

I am trying to reset an Aspire S3 laptop to factory settings using the recovery software downloaded onto a USB stick. It comes up with an error message saying Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem

insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer. (there is no DVD drive therefore no disc)

if you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator (that's me) or computer manufacturer for assistance.

status 0xc000000f

info: the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

I managed to use a key combination to get to the menu that asks if you want to do a full restore or keep your files, and when I chose the factory reset it threw up a box saying FAIL CreateiSSDPT DISK 0.

Is there any way around this problem?

Accepted answers

IronFly

try with a windows 10 installation media, it will recognise your windows 8.1 product key:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

so you will be able to install on the HDD by passing the SSD partition issue.

if you encounter a "Windows cannot install required file" message, please follow the solution:

https://community.acer.com/t5/Windows-10/Aspire-s3-391-6946-Windows-10-installation/td-p/438185

All comments

JBK

Will that work with Win 7 too? That is what was installed on the Acer originally. It has an OEM sticker on the base that says Windows 7 Home Premium and lists the windows installation key serial number, SNID etc.

IronFly

if you have a windows 7 installation media, yes it will work.

JBK

I have spent the last 5 or 6 hours downloading the Win 10 stuff from Microsoft. It is now done and has loaded onto the USB drive. I have a Win 8 disk that I bought to install through Parallells on my Mac, which is my main computer. I could download Win 7 perhaps if I needed to. Just been reading up about it as I saw somewhere that they don't accept licence keys from OEM installed software but only those sold through the web site or retail stores.

Once again, night is closing in on me so I will leave it until the morning when my brain starts working again and try the next steps you outlined in your last post. I'll let you know how I get on.

JBK

Mixed results.

The installation for Win 10 worked but i walked away and left it and when I came back a few minutes later, it was starting over with the language selection, licensing and intallation screens. after 2 or 3 cycles, I cut the power and removed the USB, went to the boot menu and changed it to boot from the hard drive and started up. That was promising, but again only went so far and didn't acually load Windows. I got the blue windows symbol and a rotating circle of dots underneath.

I then went back to the Toshiba disk in the CD drive and found command prompt again, and had another look at the disks and partitions. They are as follows;

Disk 1

Partition 1 Primary 500MB

Partition 2 Primary 465GB

Disk 0

Partition 1 OEM 18GB

I then followed the instructions to clean Disk 0 as detailed in the article you listed. After typing Clean it returned an error message;

Diskpart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

See the System Event Log for more information.

I did something--can't remember what, and got the Win 10 troubleshooter up, and that was no use either. I tried a repair, a start from installed media and it more or less said it was impossible to do anything I wanted it to.

I just ran the Win 10 USB media again. It went into a loop again and I chose the restore option so it said start Windows normally then put in the USB. Did that and got the troubleshooter again, very briefly, then it went to the Windows blue symbol and said Getting devices ready. When that reached 100% it then changed to Getting ready. I will leave it for a while and see what happens.

If it doesnt move on from there over the next few hours, should I do a clean on Disk 1 and start again, or go to my local computer man and see if he can check the SDD and replace it if it's the problem, or give it up as hopeless?

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