Non Bootable Laptop

I have a Acer Aspire 7741Z-5731. It was working fine till yesterday. I had some malware/spyware, an a blue screen would come up when I entered my desktop. I got all my data off, thankfully. I done a recovery to factory an tried doing it with out the recovery disks. Thing is that the drive is fine an the files are there. However, it sits there with a blink _ after it displays the logo ACER. :/

Kind of really need my laptop here.

 

Usually the blinking cursor is a problem with the MBR.

Are you certain the recovery completed? Did you use some sort of key sequence to start the recovery?

I don't like writing a new MBR when you require a key sequence to access the recovery partition because that functionality can be erased by writing a generic MBR to the HD.

You said the files are all there--did you use some sort of bootable disc to see the files? Which dis did you use? I'm thinking if you have a bootable disc you could make sure the Windows partition is set active. This is Win7 64 bit correct?

 

MBR, that doesnt make any sense cause, It removed all the old data. Yeah, it said 100% then the machine restarted again to that. Well that was before the recovery. I attached as a external. Yes, this is 64x Win 7

 

Attach it again as an external. Go to Disk Management and see what partitions are listed for that disk in the graph. Which one is set as boot for that disk and how large is it?

Is the computer you have it attached to also Win7 64bit? I'm thinking if it is you could create a repair disc that might be able to automatically fix the boot problem.

I've never seen where writing a new MBR didn't fix the blinking underscore cursor in the top left corner. Did you create recovery discs previously or is the recovery partition your only means of doing a factory recovery? If you have discs you could just do the fixmbr. Or you could do the fixmbr and then create the recovery discs for the future.

 

I checked the drive an appearntly, the partiton wasnt active. I redone the recovery useing the disks. I had it attached to an XP machine. Im useing the recovery disks

 

If you have the recovery discs then you can always get back to where you are now, so that is good. You don't have to worry about changing the MBR because you can always go back to the original by using the discs.

I think I would just write a generic MBR to the HD and see where that takes you. If that doesn't work then we could try to find a Win7 repair disc on the net that would give you the possibility of it automatically fixing the error. MS is having a copyright dispute with sites providing those discs but not distributing it themselves for some reason so it is a bit hard to find.

I would connect the HD to the XP machine. Download and write a generic MBR to the laptop HD. Make sure you select the laptop HD in the program before writing the MBR. You can usually discern the correct HD by brand or size.

Unzip testdisk.
Go to win folder in the testdisk folder you just unzipped and click on testdisk_win.exe.
Create is highlighted so hit <enter>
Use arrow keys to select laptop HD and hit <enter> to Proceed.
Intel is highlighted so hit <enter>
Arrow down to MBR code and hit <enter>
Hit "Y" to say yes to writing a new MBR on the laptop HD.
Put the HD back in the laptop and see if it boots or you get a different error.

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The other thing you could try if no partition is set to Active/Boot is to set one active and see if any change. You should have three partitions on the HD. One would be something like System Reserved of between 100mb and 1.4gb in size as the first partition. That is the one you would want to right-click in Disk Management and set as Active.

Rewriting the MBR would set this partition as active by default.

 

I have no clue what that really does with this. Any how, Not sure if yours solved the issue or not. I took out both sticks of RAM an tried booting. Passed the memory tests. Ran the recovery again an was able to get it working