acer aspire one happy laptop harddrive seems to have failed

zoesmummy_2006

I bought an acer aspire one happy laptop back at the end of may off a business seller on ebay, and last night it froze while i was on the internet. I held the powere button to switch it off and restart it, but when i did that i got a black screen that says 'no bootable device'. my brother has looked and says its not even showing hard drive option on bios or whatever (sorry im really not techie minded!!)

my brother knows someone who works at a computer store and they charge £75 an hour (:eek:) just to look at it!!!! my bro is normally pretty good with laptops but hes never done a netbook before and cant get into the back of mine to check. it out.

Does anyone have any advice. £75 is half what i paid for the laptop to begin with, but i really would like to get it mended if possible cos it has pics of my kids on it!!!!!

fwor

If the hard disk is not showing in the BIOS there's a good chance that it has failed.

However, there have been numerous Acer Aspire One models, and you really need to find out exactly which model you have, as some had SSD's instead of traditional hard disks. Take a look at the wiki and see if you can figure out the exact model.

Wannie_2

She stated the model...it's a HAPPY. You have to un-clip the keyboard in order to remove the back case. A bit annoying perhaps.

Here take a look.

Purchase this External Hard Drive Enclosure for £3.20.

Get your Bro to remove the HDD now he knows how and use the enclosure to attempt to retrieve your pictures.

He can then purchase a new SATA HDD, perhaps this one for £35. Perhaps someone can point to something cheaper of equal quality.

We can then help with reinstalling Windows.

fwor

Ah Ok, the Happy doesn't appear in the main table in the wiki, but does further down. It refers to some versions being able to dual-boot Android and Windows, so it's possible that the HDD is OK and somehow the bootloader has been messed up? Having said that, the BIOS should still recognise it...

If you're not absolutely sure and want to check if the hard drive is still viable it would be worth downloading the Netbook edition of Ubuntu and booting that from a USB memory stick. Both the built-in Disk Utility and the Partition Editor will give you useful info about the hard disk - such as SMART status.

[Edit: with the latest release of the desktop version of Ubuntu you no longer need a special edition for an Aspire One - it should boot fine from the standard desktop USB version.]

zoesmummy_2006

oooooh thanks for the links and advice, thats great. My brothers goona have a go at it for me now he knows how to take the keyboard off etc. the harddrive light is still lighting up when the laptop comes on so am hoping its something simple. Be a learning curve for my bro, he can strip and rebuild pc's and update etc etc without issue, but he's never tried to do a laptop like mine lol.

Fingers crossed it works!!!!!