ASUS EeePC 900 won't boot after battery drained

Greetings...

A co-worker gave me his EeePC 900 to look at because it won't boot. He apparently broke the power cable and completely drained the battery dry. After borrowing another cable (from another PC900) we can get the computer to boot into the BIOS but if you try a normal boot it get's a Disk Read Error and won't boot further. It's an SSD. Am I missing something, or is the Windows install corrupted beyond recovery?

Thanks.

PS: Tried Reset Button and Power Button Reset Method... no fix.

 

If it's getting a disk read error then more than likely you willl need to reinstall the operating system.

However I don't understand how the battery draining would cause it to lose the OS.

 

I guess I could see where, since it's a solid state drive, the power drainage might have affected it. Halo is right however that you might be able to do a repair install.

 

Apparently it was "pinched".

Checked the BIOS twice over.

WinXP Basic... it's a Netbook. Waiting for the external CD-ROM for re-install if necessary.

 

Yep i had the exact same problem with a Sony Vaio pcg-k45 laptop; same story cept when i power it on all i get is bios function and "operating system not found" I'm pretty sure the HDD took a crap. The laptop isn't even detecting the HDD in bios, so I'm still yet to buy a new HDD and recovery discs from sony. Here's my advice with out reading the rest of this first (sorry lol) Reinstall the OS or do a recover/restore if you have the option to.

 

As an aside: I've had to service several Aspire netbooks in my area recently because of the "Operating System not found" problem after a complete battery drainage - in these cases, the fix was a flash upgrade available from the Acer site...

 

The funny thing is, and it's not funny cause ASUS is so reputable, this is an issue I remember happening some time last year with Asus EeePC 900 users, basically because the battery is no good at power management. The battery will drain itself even when it's not in use; some 10%-20% a day. So, not using it for 8-10 days means the battery will drain itself without interaction from you. Go figure.

If you can get the XP disk, try using the Recovery Console and typing in: fixmbr. Sometimes the master boot record can get overwritten in a power surge or flux, like when a PSU in a desktop gets drained by too many devices. This may or may not help.

As far as I can tell, you are going to have to reinstall the OS to fix the issue.

 

It would. It shouldn't actually damage the SSD, but it would do some seriously messy things to the data on it. Silverlining of that is that if you can get your hands on an OS disk, you can redo that partition and reinstall, and that will probably make the netbook usable again.

Oh, and also, ASUS released a bois update or two for this netbook, install them if that hasn't been done. Among other things, I think they fix some power managemetn and video display issues.

Last edit, promise See if you can find the CMOS re-set button in the back. They tend to try and hide it around/in the battery compartment. I resurrected a co-workers Acer netbook by pushing that button a few days ago.

 

Thanks for the posts, as I mentioned I tried both the hidden reset button on the bottom, and the hold-power-button reset as well... no joy.

 

That sucks that power drainage can result in data loss on a SSD.

 

Well, it's NAND flash... leave it in the device when the battery drains, and bad things will happen. It's as true for SSDs as it is for those littel SD cards you put in your camera.