ACER TravelMate cannot power on

[wngman]

Hi, so my girlfriends' laptop is having some fun problems, and it figures it happens when she is out of town. It is a year old Acer TravelMate, can't remember the exact model number at the moment.

When turned on it will boot up, show the acer logo image, and then the windows loading page. It then goes completely black, and then goes back to the acer logo and keeps repeating this process. I had her try to plug it in, remove and battery, and boot in safe mode but the same thing happens everytime.

Anyone know what it could be or how to fix it?

[classicsoftware]

There are several possibilites.

RAM

Heat

Hard drive.

1 & 3 can be tested....

[wngman]

Hey thanks for the response.
I won't be able to try anything until she gets back into town next week. What tests would you recommend? I know Memtest86 for the RAM, and the normal disk check. Are there better ones out there?

[classicsoftware]

You need to determine the manufacturer of the hard drive and download their diagnostic software....

[wngman]

Well I finally figured out what was wrong. Turned out to be a windows boot file was corrupted or missing or ... something.

I ended up using my camera to record the screen as it started up, and caught the millisecond that a BSOD popped up. Looking at the vid on my desktop i could read the error statement,

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}...

From some research I found the best way to fix this was just a clean reinstall of XP, so thats what I did, first backing up some files thru an Ubuntu live cd.

Works like a charm now, and also took the oppurtunity to repartition the harddrive. It was previously split 50/50, windows on one, personal files on another. Now its more of a 20/80 split, 20 GB for XP, 90 some for file storage.

Something weird though, was that the Acer didnt ship with an XP re-install disk, but I had made a backup disc last summer, that was supposed to be able to restore factory defaults. I tried that, and it had an error too. So the final solution was accessing the recovery partition using Alt + F10 and doing the default restore through that.

The real question is how the file got messed in the first place. Hopefully it wont happen again :)

[Paul Komski]

Just for the future:

Constant reboot loops can be caused by both hardware and software problems.

The same is true of any BSODs that may or may not be involved.

Trying Safe Mode (and running msconfig if Safe Mode will let you in) can usually help discriminate between hardware/software and what software.

The software problems can relate to corrupted boot processes (boot sectors or files), viruses, corrupt registry and corrupt file system as well as rogue programs with memory leaks or malformed hardware drivers and so on.

The real question is how the file got messed in the first place.
Without knowing which file it is hard to give any specific answer but one common type of message is that a file (ntldr or ntdetect.com or hal.dll or etc) is missing or is corrupt. Often it is not actually missing but the boot processes are misdirected and do not reach the file. In such cases, a common conduit is a malformed boot.ini file.

It is not unknown for automatic updates to create these type of problems "out of the blue". When problems are not caused by hardware or malware or a corrupt file system then a good blunderbuss approach is to simply try a full repair installation (http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm).

Without a specific diagnosis the cause cannot be determined but everything from an overfull drive to bad memory to a failing hard drive to sudden power loss to a virus to all sorts of incorrect user intervention to ........ could have been at the root of things. Also bear in mind that hardware and software are not mutually exclusive; bad hardware can affect software and vice versa.

I should also have said that if one can get in using Safe Mode that (1) the event logs can be viewed and (2) that stop type errors of the BSOD type can be blocked from creating an automatic reboot using:

1. Right-click My Computer and click Properties.
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings.
4. Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times.
5. Restart your computer and cross your fingers and then be able to fully read any blue screens that appear without any haste.

PS
I have since found even more good ideas from LabMice (http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid1_gci968110,00.html), which I had forgotten to mention, including using "Last Known Good" in order to "gain entry" and the use of chkdsk for a bad file system.