Acer Aspire One Issues

I've been given a Acer Aspire One Netbook to look at. I believe it's a model 1225 (Stickers are faded out - hard to read)

Anyway, The original problem I found was that the hard drive was not being detected at start up. I went into BIOS to see what was being detected and there was no HD available.

I pulled the HD out and USB'd it to my desktop to see if it would recognize. At first, I got a detection sound from my desktop but nothing came up. I went to computer to see if it was detected and nothing was showing there. I had this connection made through a "CablesToGo" setup and it had it's own power supply so, I "bumped" the switch several times because I was not hearing the drive start up. Each time I would close or open power at the switch, I could hear my desktop sounding out that something was being connected but it still would not display.

Finally, after several attempts, I heard the HD whirl and my desktop showed the contents!

I've played around with it for a night or two, cleaning out un-needed software and browser bars, running malware scans and such. I got it running but things were very slow. I assumed I might be looking at Boot Sector issues, maybe from malware, so I ran the READ & RUN ME FIRST procedures to eliminate any malware concerns. No malware was detected but, after that process, I started having boot up issues, I could not boot in normal mode only safe mode.

This moring, I found the system frozen so I forced a reboot and then it wouldn't even allow safe mode. I decided to enable boot logging, which it did, but crashed again. I eventually pulled out the memory card, cleaned off the contacts and replaced. Now it let me boot into windows in safe mode /networking.

So, that's where I'm at! I don't want to reboot for fear.....but I want to rule out hardware issues before I move on!

Sorry for the long post!

 

My advice would be if you want to save the entire contents of the drive, clone it while you still can.

I have in the past frozen inaccessible HDDS, and kept them on ice while managing to clone them. I'm not saying it will work in your case, but create an exact copy while you have the chance...

:major

 

OK, I've never attempted the cloning process before but it does sound interesting. Let me read up on it and see what I can do.

The Acer, from what I can see so far is a Western Digital 250gb 5400rpm SATA notebook HD. Without taking it out, I'm assuming it is a Scorpio Blue Model, but that's just a quick look. (WDC WD2500BEVT-22A23T0)

I do have another HD sitting here on my shelf that came out of a laptop. It is a Hitachi 250gb 5400rpm SATA notebook HD. (HTS542525K9SA00)

Just trying to picture this in my mind, I could see both HD's connected to my desktop via USB. Some cool software cloning a target HD to a Destination HD. But, like I said, I need to read up on it!

BTW, a cloned hd is an operational hd, correct? I mean, I can replace the old one with the new cloned one and still run the computer with it?

 

Absolutely. A cloned image from one disk to another is as fully bootable as the original. Sometimes I use the EZ-Gig software provided with my Apricorn DriveWire tool, or Easeus' DiskCopy. Just personal preference.

The only thing that will change when you reboot is the driver for the HDD. It doesn't sound like the HDD is in the kind of shape where I would boot it, so I would just let Windows replace the driver when you boot the new drive for the first time.

One of my favorite tools are my DriveWire adapters:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E16812161002&gclid=CK_S8LCd6rgCFYak4Aodxn8A0w

 

OK...I'll take a look at EaseUS...

 

OK, I'm running EaseUS and currently in the Copy process.

Right now, I'm getting a read error popup: Failed to read sector XXXXXXX, [Retry], [Ignore], [Ignore All], [Abort]

I've already tried to [Retry] without any luck so, I suppose I should probably Abort this process and try and get back into windows to run chkdsk, maybe even defrag as well to see if I can clear this up?

 

That's not a good sign. Considering the difficulties you had accessing the drive in the beginning, the error most likely means that the drive is in serious trouble.

Using chkdsk is ordinarily not recommended because it's rather generic in it's repair efforts, but in this case the only thing you have to lose is what access you happened to get to the hard drive. It could be the drive motor, the actuator, or the head which wrote the bad sector, or is causing the bad read.

At this point if you are going to clone the drive, it would be either chkdsk, or try "Ignore" to get it done. At this point I wouldn't try a defragment, because moving/writing data could make it worse.

 

Not a good sign indeed! Right now I'm 56% of the way through and have came across 118 bad sectors. At this rate, there will be nothing left to copy.

I'd say this HD is toast!

 

Well, it completed the disk copy process with a total of 500 Read Errors!

I went ahead and switched out the boot drive to the new (cloned) one and everything is just as it was before...I can boot in safe mode only!

 

Well then, I think an attempt at a "Windows Repair" is in order.