Laptop factory restore interrupted

mrschaucer

I have an Acer Aspire laptop which is a few years old now and runs Windows Vista. As it's old, the battery life is minimal (~10 minutes without being connected to mains power).

Today I backed up my files onto a portable hard drive with the intention of running a factory reset (through the computer - not sure where the backup disks I made are), as its memory is full with all sorts of irrelevant programs and processes after 4 years, making it run sluggishly. Anyway, back-up was fine, and was able to find and begin running the factory reset.

The problem came when, after having shut down and restarted, running a screen which I think was showing reformatting of the hard drive (status bar) - the computer shut down in the middle of the process without any notice. I then realised that the power cable was not plugged in in exactly the right way, and so it had been running off battery power, and simply conked out when it was out of power.

Now when I attempt to turn the laptop on, I get a very brief "acer" startup screen as usual, and then it reverts to a black command-type screen with a white cursor/underscore thing flashing in the top left.

Is there anything I can do now? It's unlikely that I'll be able to find the recovery disks I made, but I'm not sure that they would even work if the computer isn't even booting anything...

If anyone can offer any sort of help - please do it in words of one syllable that are easy for a non-techie to understand!

stilltheone

You can attempt to fix the recovery process or you can just run a clean install of Vista and to install the Drivers manually.

Full model number?

mrschaucer

Aspire 5103WLMi.
How would I go about fixing the recovery process please? A friend suggested Alt and F10, but this doesn't seem to work...

stilltheone

mrschaucer wrote: »

Aspire 5103WLMi.
How would I go about fixing the recovery process please? A friend suggested Alt and F10, but this doesn't seem to work...

You ran Vista on that? Must have been sluggish. Should try it with XP. Will run nicely.

Did it come with Vista installed or XP Media Centre?

mrschaucer

It came with Vista. Yes, it's always been quite slow, but was cheapish and all I could afford!

closed

hold down the power button for 10 seconds.

if that doesn't work, restart the erecovery process, usually by holding ALT and F10 at boot.

If neither of those work, you will need to find the discs.

If you get it running, disable defender realtime scanning, and use avast 6 free as a a virus scanner, and try installing cleanmem to keep it running fast

stilltheone

If the above instructions don't work and if you don't have a problem with losing the functionality of the Recovery Partition, you can do a clean install with XP. It will be much quicker.

mrschaucer

No, that doesn't work. Just turns it off. How do I restart the erecovery prog? All I get when I turn it on is a blank screen with a cursor topleft. Ta

closed

remove any dvd's/cd's, remove any usb devices, remove the battery, remove the power cord, insert power cord, leaving battery out, power on.

mrschaucer

Done all the above, thanks, and all I'm getting is a hideous noise.

mrschaucer

Is this the sound of my laptop dying?