Hard Drive Issues

2020

Hi, I'm a bit of a novice but trying to work out what has happened to my laptop. I have an Acer Aspire 5750G and it appears to have died a death in recent days.

On start up I got the loading windows image and it freezes on here so I have tried to enter the Alt+F10 and restore windows, this process completed the other day up until the point it was installing or set up devices where it stayed on this screen for up to 12 hours. I'm giving it another go now to see if I can get it any further.

What I'm wondering is is the Hard Drive dead, or would it not even enable me to get to this stage if it were bust?

I don't have the recovery media, lost in a house move, and when I was attempting to create the new discs this is when the laptop pretty much gave up. If I were to buy a new hard drive and install it would these recovery disks even be any good or would I need to buy a new windows package too?

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silizium

First, if your operating system is not booting this means not something is broken. Sometimes, it's an application that is causing this behavior or an update that was not correctly installed. You should boot into safe mode and take a look into the event viewer.

http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-boot-into-windows-8-safe-mode/

2020

I can't boot using safe mode or via any mode. It gives me the options to then when I choose one I get a 'windows failed to load because a critical system driver is missing' message. I've noticed that the c:... part that it says it is missing changes each time I try and load, so a different ending.

Would this not be my hard drive then? Am I best off trying to get hold of some Acer recovery media? I'm able to Alt+F10 at the start and get into recovery that way but this is as far as it takes me. I don't want to buy a new hard drive if I don't have to obviously but now unsure whether it is this or something else. Thanks

Latest error is

/windows/system32/drivers/sisraid4.sys

silizium

Of course this could be your harddrive but it has not to be. I would try to make a repair installation with your installation media. If you have it. If not, you will have to organize one.

Sometimes the partition table is damaged and to fix this kind of error is to write a new bootblock. If you do a repair installation, than this bootblock should written again automatically. Additionally files that are deleted are copied again.

If that is not working, because Windows installation cannot find a harddisk or there are write errors, than you can look for a new harddisk. You would have to install Windows anyway in that case.

2020

Thanks Silizium. I've tried again via safe mode and it loads quite a lot of Windows files and then gets to the same message, this time with /windows/system32/drivers/ql2300.sys being the missing driver. I will try and acquire some acer media from somewhere or pay Acer the £50 they are asking and see if that works. When it keeps loading files it gives me hope it's not the Hard Drive but we shall see. There's nothing on the laptop I need to keep so if it wipes everything and works that would be good with me!

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