Laptop just won't install any OS?

Question

Alright I have an Acer Aspire 5610z which originally was running windows vista but as i'm a techy person I downloaded the windows 7 beta and RC and i have been running them since. However I am giving the laptop to my little brother when I go to university so I decided to use the acer recovery disc's that came with it and re-install vista. The process got to about 89 percent and then it said it had failed at which point the laptop turned off. I then decided to use my XP disc to see if it was an OS incompatibility error but it didnt even start to install XP. I can't re-install windows 7 yet either because it requires a pre-existing OS to install over.

So basically the laptop is sitting here with nothing on it and none of the disc's having any luck at starting the system up. Does anyone have any suggestions about what may have happened and how I might fix it.

TIA

Answer 1

I'm guessing that it now says something like "No Operating System Found" when trying to boot WITHOUT a CD. However, if the same thing happens when you try to use one of the install CDs, there is either something wrong with your CD drive, or the computer isn't trying to boot off the CD.



The easiest way to diagnose this would be to get another bootable CD you know works in another computer, and try it in your laptop. I'd recommend a Linux live CD, like Ubuntu from ubuntu.com. If you can get ANY other bootable CD to work, then the CD drive is good, and your XP and Vista discs could be bad. If no other CD will work, you have a bigger problem. Here are some things you could try if that's the case.



When you first turn on the computer, it should probably display the Acer logo. Somewhere it should say "Press *some key* to enter setup/BIOS". Press this key. BIOS will have to be navigated with the keyboard; usually the arrow keys and the enter key do most things.



First, you want to see if the computer is even recognizing the CD drive. If you find the list of drives and it lists the hard drive but not CD drive, that's your problem for sure. The CD drive is somehow broken or disconnected.



If the CD drive IS listed in BIOS, the laptop may not be trying to boot off of it. Try to find the boot order menu, and make sure the CD drive is listed ahead of the hard drive. You probably want the CD drive to be the first boot device.



If the CD drive is listed in BIOS and is set first in the boot order, but the computer will not boot off any CD, you have a hardware problem. It's likely that the CD drive has failed, but it could be other things, like memory somehow getting disconnected, or the motherboard going bad.

Answer 2

Make sure you are wiping the hard drive before you try to install from the recovery disk, or XP disk.



I remember one time, thinking i had blanked the hard drive and was installing a clean XP, but it turns out all i was doing was overwriting all the old XP files with the ones from the CD. It could be your doing something like that and its crashing because there are leftover windows 7 files.



A truely clean install shouldn't have any problems.

Answer 3

Disable any internal hardware on the laptop such as sound card, ethernet card, wifi card. Maybe one of them had problem. Then when you install, format the hard drive when installing it. If you still have problem, then remove the partition where OS is installed, create partition about 10GB in size, then create another partition that covers rest of the hard drive. Then delete the 10GB partition. Then install the OS on the partition that is remaining(the rest of the hard drive partition).

This is to see if first 10GB section of the hard drive is having problem, you are skipping the problem section.



By the way, the XP installation will not see any SATA hard drive. So you need to download SATA controller driver, then during the installation, when it asks for the custom driver(such as SCSI driver), type the F6 key that it's asking you to type, then install the SATA controller driver so that XP installation sees the SATA drivers.

Answer 4

Yeah I don't know what you're talking about. I installed window 7 rc on a seperate HDD that had no previous OS before. There maybe something wrong with your HDD. Try downloading UBCD and running the killdisk program. You will have to burn the UBCD iso to a disc in order to boot from it. Killdisk will wipe your HDD clean.



http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Answer 5

Rule #1: laptops DOESNT work fine with other OS than the one it came with it. why? because the drivers, hardware..etc

Rule #2 laptops are not desktops, so dont do something to a laptop that you will do to desktop (example: experiments with OS, gaming with an inapropiate laptop, playing with the hardware... etc)

And

Rule#3: laptops like the ones sold in Dell can have Windows xp, vista, ubuntu from factory. so you dont have to trouble with that



To repair it, just use the recovery disk, if you dont have it look for it in the web page support from your laptops brand

Answer 6

windows 7 rc does not require another o/s to installo ver,, ive installed fresh on many systems already?????,,,





yeah i would try downloading unbuntu,, or google o/s install those as they comunicate with directley with the kernel in more efficiant way,,, you should have gui acceptance,,, download one of them n put it on disc,,,, try installing that,, or try using the rtm version on windows 7....and reformat the drive from the disc

Answer 7

Nope becuase the CD key is registered to your laptop.

Answer 8

You can try running a Linux Live CD to see if there are any hardware issues.

Answer 9

go talk to the best but ppl they are good 4 answering any ????'s