Acer laptop stuck in diagnostic cycle

charley539

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone can help me.

I have a Acer aspire E1 laptop. I bought it from currys last Christmas. It has had a new hard drive when the first one crashed (and a second one when they fitted the wrong size).
It crashed about a week ago, then started 'diagnosing your pc', this lasts about 8 hours, but dispite trying most of the options it just reverts back to the diagnostic screen.
I created a recovery media flash drive, should I be using this instead?

I was in the process of tidying files to back up to external drive and syncing on Firefox when it crashed, is there any way to retrieve my files?

Thank you for any help you can offer.

Cyberman60

My solution would be to restore the system, either from a system back-up CD or from back-up on the hard-drive, if you are not able to recover from a more recent restore point. If your laptop crashed due to a virus for instance you may be able to restore from the more recent restore point. I've had to do both these options a few times on my laptop.

To get into recovery options you will need to press F8 if you can, on initial startup. On a full system back-up recovery you will lose your personal data btw.

I hope this is of help.

NiftyDigits

If you have another machine, you can create a Live OS Bootable USB Drive. Ubuntu is one such. You then choose the USB drive as the first bootable drive(as opposed to the current hard drive), then choosing the Try Ubuntu option. This opens up an operating system using RAM only, therefore not disturbing anything on the current hard drive.
Then you can choose to 'mount'(read what is on the current hard drive) using the new OS(operating system). You can look for your files and copy them to another connected USB Flash/external hard drive or to a DVD Drive.
Alternatively, you could simply take the hard drive out and put it into an external caddy, such as this one for £3.49. Then to copy all of your data to another machine, space permitting and if the HDD is actually working.
Then you can look at what to do next.
That ACER sounds like a lemon. Probably a throwback from the cheap and nasty eMachine range.

charley539

Thank you both for your help.

NiftyDigits, that is so helpful, thank you so much. I am gonna try that to retrieve my files.
I had an acer many years ago, it was fantastic, and lasted me years. I thought that they were still good machines.

NiftyDigits

charley539 wrote: »

Thank you both for your help.

NiftyDigits, that is so helpful, thank you so much. I am gonna try that to retrieve my files.
I had an acer many years ago, it was fantastic, and lasted me years. I thought that they were still good machines.

I'm sure many still are...but then they absorbed eMachines...whose machines were not that good.