Unwilling to boot fully regardless of the OS

I have a Acer AspireOne Notebook ZA3 with Windows XP. BSoD appears right after the preloader appears(the one with the Windows XP Logo on start up) and then it just restarts right away.

I tried swapping the hard drive with another one that has windows 7 starter on it, samething; cannot get past the logo part.

Did 2 memory scans on the RAM(1GB DDR2), no errors.

I then reformated the disk with windows 7 and booted Meego and then subsequently with Fuduntu. Installed fine but it won't get past the Windows equivalent of the logo screen.

Any help with troubleshooting will be appreciated.

 

You may still be able to go back to XP and restore the computer to the factory state if you did not wipe the recovery partition when you installed the linux distro.

Create a bootable USB with Gparted partition manager and boot. I believe that on an Acer the Recovery partition is first and the OS system partition is second. Find the OS partition and delete it. Create another and format NTFS. Click on the recovery partition and select Partition>manage flags and mark it as boot. Then remove the USB drive and reboot into the Acer System Restore. After you have done the restore, boot back into GParted and mark the OS partition as boot.

You can create a bootable Gparted USB drive with Tuxboot and the latest Gparted download. You want to use the 0.9.0.7 version as there was a bug regarding NTFS in 0.9.0.6

If you still wish to use Windows 7 or a linux distro, I would recommend that you first do a format with this utility to zero out everything and then start the install again. This recovery partition may be the reason you cannot continue on the boot.

 

You may have an issue with the cpu cooling heatsink or fan. If the fan is not working or the heatsink thermal paste has dried out, the cpu will heat up past safe temp in under a minute ( a lot of load on a cpu during OS loading) and most cpu's have an internal safety shutdown (and also in the BIOS setup too) where once the cpu reaches that temp it shuts itself off.

Sam

 

Thanks I tried what you said using TuxBoot and GParted, it still won't boot.

Tried a 3rd OS CrunchBang, samething; the kernel won't load. But it can be booted from a thumbdrive. Not sure what this means exactly.

I also tried flashing the BIOS, still nothing. And getting desperate.

 

Format a USB flash drive to FAT32. Then download Unetbootin and the latest version of Puppy. Run Unetbootin and point it to the Puppy iso. Can you boot the USB flash drive? If so, Puppy has Gparted. Using Gparted, look to see if the drive still had the rescue partition. If Unetbootin does not work for you, try linux live usb creator.