Aspire 5735 urgent help needed...

deecrutch

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Apr 23, 2005
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My aunt brought me her Aspire 5735 laptop after it had gotten gummed up with malware to the point where it would not boot into Vista. At first I thought about doing a full system recovery, but she didn't have her recovery discs, so I figured I'd just reformat it and reinstall Vista clean.

When I went to install Vista, I saw that there were 2 partitions, and I figured that since she didn't have the recovery discs anyway, I might as well wipe those out and just have one big partition. So I deleted both of them (one was the normal windows partition, and the other was marked DATA). Only thing is now, Vista can't see a hard drive AT ALL!

I've done this 100 times with XP, just delete the old partitions and install XP in the unpartitioned space, so imagine my surprise when Vista doesn't see any unpartitioned space to install itself into. Vista is acting as if there isn't a hard drive in the system at all.

The only option I have is a button that says 'Load Drivers'. The thing is, I have no clue as to which drivers to load. I went to the Acer site and downloaed the chipset drivers, hoping that that would do the trick, but it didn't. Vista couldn't find any drivers on the cd I made, and I ended up going through pretty much every driver on the disc except the usb ones, and none of it had an effect. Vista still is acting as if it can't see the hard drive.

So the question is are there some drivers out there that I can use to get Vista to see my hard drive, or is it possible that I could 'undelete' the partitions that I deleted and try to install Vista from there??? If there are some drivers out there, what would I need to look for and where can I find them? If drivers aren't an option, then what about either undeleting the partitions or just using some partition software to repartition the drive if that would even work?

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 
Solution
Go and download killdisk. Burn a bootable CD with it. Load that CD on the laptop and boot from it. It should see the HDD, go ahead and zero it ( you will need to do that regardless, because of the malware). Then reinstall the OS on a clean, factory-restored HDD (that you just made). Good luck.

house70

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Apr 21, 2010
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Go and download killdisk. Burn a bootable CD with it. Load that CD on the laptop and boot from it. It should see the HDD, go ahead and zero it ( you will need to do that regardless, because of the malware). Then reinstall the OS on a clean, factory-restored HDD (that you just made). Good luck.
 
Solution

deecrutch

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Thanks for the answer, but I ended up fixing it another way. Someone in another topic here suggested tweaking a BIOS setting (one of the SATA settings, moving it to IDE, can't remember exactly which setting now). But anyway, doing that let me run an old xp disc with no troubles. Once xp got to where it could see the hard disc, then Vista could also see it, and it was all good from then on.

I am sure your answer would have worked as well, as it seems all that was really needed was something that could see the hard drive and partition it. Why Vista couldn't do that (or even Win7 for that matter), I don't know, but they couldn't.

Thanks anyway.
 

house70

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Glad it worked out for you.
Just remember, some malware doesn't go away after simple formatting, so if it happens again, make sure you do a low level formatting before re-installing the OS. That was the only reason I recommended that path.