Solved! Acer Aspire 5534, Windows 7

[Toadill]

Hello everyone I am a newbie here at Tom's Hardware

I have been fixing computers since windows 95

I am trying to determine weather the hard drive in this computer is shot. Since I do not have college level experience in hardware, I figured I would ask someone with more expertise in the matter. Thank you all ahead of time! 😍


Here is the screen I get when I try to boot the computer normal; it just hangs



So I use the F8 menu and tried everything, and everything leads to the same hang even command prompt



As you can see below when I tried the command prompt in hung on the AtiPcie.sys file


I decide to try to boot from cd rom and use the repair disc




I am in the f2 menu as you can see the SATA Mode is set to AHCI Mode by default



So I try to use the Windows 7 repair disc



When I try to use the Windows 7 repair disc in this mode it just hangs on this screen



So I switch the SATA Mode to IDE Mode to see if it makes a difference 😀



And it does the repair disc is loaded 😱



The first thing I try is the Startup repair


and it seems to be doing its thing

After 6 hours I gave up on this

Next I tried the restore point, NONE
I had no image to use.... because the PC is not mine
I tried the memory test, which tested normal
I then tried command prompt and ran a chkdsk D: /f
Chkdsk also hangs around 4% I left this run for at least 10 hours It also reported multiple files were inaccessible




I tried to run the windows 7 setup and install a new, even though the files prob aren't all there.




No cd-rom driver found


Any suggestions or comments

 

[Max1s]

Well I had problems with the stupid AHCI/IDE mode thing too, but it looks like yours is a bit more complex. Have you switched out HDs to see if maybe the mobo is acting up? Also maybe pull out the HD and slap it into another PC as a secondary and run some diagnostics.
I usually use HDTune, and let it scan through each sector of the drive. Takes forever but it works.

 

[Toadill]

Actually I realized just a little while ago that I did not try one thing. After switching to IDE mode I never tried going into the F8 menu. I tried this and went to repair which gave me a new option in the system recovery options under command prompt, "RESTORE WINDOWS TO DEFAULT". This finally allowed me to completely restore the system! Thank you for taking the time to respond to this post it is much appreciated.

Thank you Max1S you were definitely on the right track!

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!