please don't laugh...

nailgunner · 28 Oct 2010

I hope she didn't give up. Without sound patronizing, I wanted to compliment her one last time. My computer experience goes back to the 70's when I took programming classes in COBOL, BAL, RPG, etc. I moved on to another profession, but was always involved heavily with computers in a professional and personal capacity.

That said, I never got involved much in formatting drives. And I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I now think I know less about it than I did a week ago.

It may be because I've moved on in age a bit, but that stuff was starting to look like Latin.

But hang in there if you are so inclined.

Dave76 · 28 Oct 2010

Hope to hear if she got it working or even if she didn't.

mypcbroke · 28 Oct 2010

Sorry, it's been a while since I checked in. I've just been following some steps greg suggested about imaging and it's taking more time and a few more tries than expected. I'm nothing if not subborn. I WILL figure this out if its the last thing I do.
I'm still going at it, but I'll update if this works.

Thanks for all the help :)

kodi · 28 Oct 2010

Welcome back, we were beginning to wonder if you had given up.
Good to see that you are determined to fix this computer, as long as you continue to post we will be here to help.

mypcbroke · 29 Oct 2010

After one 2003 falling apart at the seams XP Dell, Windows image backup, Paragon Backup & Recovery, external HD, and a frozen bag of peas later, this where I'm at: Windows Home Premium is in my pc (somewhere) but I haven't booted just yet.

I've been running "repair startup" a few dozen times but I still get the "A disk read error occurred," "No bootable device," or "BOOTMGR is missing" error.

Following some knowledgable advice, I created a partition on my old XP Dell and installed Windows 7. Annoyingly enough, it installed and booted perfectly on that machine. The laptop's condition leaves much to be desired and has a tendency to overheat and shutdown -and that's where my frozen bag of peas came in. It successfully backed up the laptop image on my external HD.

I then copied it to my Acer via Windows image backup and Paragon Backup & Recovery. I have triple checked that the partition with Windows 7 is "active" and every few "repair startup" tries I do have the CD repairing and restarting.
I have attempted all steps through IDE and AHCI (because I wasn't sure which was the one to use). Right now, Windows 7 is installed in AHCI and repairing away.

I have also previously tried this in command prompt:

bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd

But no juice. Gah, not sure what I'm doing wrong...

zzz2496 · 29 Oct 2010

Oh my god... You are officially "Skilled" !!! By the way, in my book... If you did the install normally on another computer and the installed OS boots up normally, you should now look at the "devil" laptop that gives you all this grieve a hard long devastating look, the "you are dead to me" look (quoted from "How I met your mother").

zzz2496

Edit: I forgot one thing... I have suspicion on your HDD/storage controller for a while, your newest post you said about the laptop has a tendency to overheat and shutdown. This incident(s) can lead to catastrophic hardware failure, and I hope now isn't the case... but it does lead me to believe that it's a hardware failure (at least I suspect your HDD/storage controller is failing).

Lordbob75 · 29 Oct 2010

At this point, it might be worth it to go see if you can pick up a new HDD. Make sure to ask if you can return it if it doesn't fix it.
I am guessing either bad cable, bad HDD, or bad mobo.

It might be worth it to just take it to a tech shop and ask whats wrong too.

Nice job keeping up, following advice, and posting back! Lets get this damn thing fixed already.

~Lordbob

si8mon · 29 Oct 2010

mypcbroke said:

I created a partition on my old XP Dell and installed Windows 7. The laptop's condition leaves much to be desired and has a tendency to overheat and shutdown -and that's where my frozen bag of peas came in.

I had a smiler problem with my (2 years old) laptop. Dust had built up in the computer and more impotently in the fan, so the laptop was getting no ventilation. This caused my laptop to regularly get hot and often shutdown after only an hour in use. So I went to my local office supplies shop and got a can of compressed air (for under $10) and used it to clean all the dust out of my laptop.

After I did that, my laptop ran perfectly cool and never overheated. So I would suggest opening the back off your laptop and see if there is a lot of dust inside, if there is, go and get a can of compressed air and spray it all out. Once completing that, the laptop should work fine.

gregrocker · 29 Oct 2010

Let's try manually to write the MBR to Win7 partition.

boot the 7 dvd, press Shft F10 at first screen to open command prompt, type:

Diskpart
lis vol
(get the Win7 drive letter - it might be different from PW or WinRE)
exit

Then type

bootsect /nt60 C: (replace C with whatever the 7 drive letter is)

press enter

If Win7 doesn't start now, or attempt to start but stalls at Starting Windows color orbs screen, boot back into DVD Command line to type:

bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /fixmbr

If Win7 doesn't start now, try running Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots again.

If Win7 attempts to Start but stalls at Starting Windows color orbs, it needs to be adjusted to the new Hardware using Paragon Adpative Restore CD to Adjust Hardware.

Dave76 · 29 Oct 2010

If the MBR repair doesn't get your laptop booting into Win7.

Can you give us some more information on your old Dell laptop?
Details on the HDD so we can see if it's possible to install the Dell laptop's HDD in your Acer laptop to determine if this may be a HDD issue.