A guy at my work brought in his Acer laptop (11mths old) for me to look at as it is no longer booting into vista. As a user of XP I've to yet made the leap to Vista (tried it, the incessant asking for authorisation for everything did my head in) so I'm a bit short on knowledge here.
When booting the HD partition with vista it comes up with "Disk Read Error"; on checking the HD with GParted it sees the HD fine and sees the three partitions as below
0 - 'Restore' - 9GB
1 - Main one - 34GB
2 - Spare - 34GB
The disk is fine (I think) as doing disk check with Hirens and UBD show no problems (once I'd got around the fact that the HD was set to AHCI is BIOS). The lappy will boot to the restore partition once I set the flag in GParted and gives me options to restore the HD.
BUT, in GParted it will not read partition 1 properly; it comes up with an exclamation mark and shows an error (iirc) about $ntfs not being a valid name or can't be found.
With that information aside I was wondering if the hard disk it self had become corrupt or that the MBR (or vista equivilant now) had become corrupt. If the latter can it be restored from a DVD (like XP)or is there another way? :?
However, I've been told that there are pics and music that thus guy wants to keep on his HD without resorting to a restore - guess what, no backup afaik. I suppose I could install XP/vista to the spare partition to get it running and to fully check the disk.
When booting the HD partition with vista it comes up with "Disk Read Error"; on checking the HD with GParted it sees the HD fine and sees the three partitions as below
0 - 'Restore' - 9GB
1 - Main one - 34GB
2 - Spare - 34GB
The disk is fine (I think) as doing disk check with Hirens and UBD show no problems (once I'd got around the fact that the HD was set to AHCI is BIOS). The lappy will boot to the restore partition once I set the flag in GParted and gives me options to restore the HD.
BUT, in GParted it will not read partition 1 properly; it comes up with an exclamation mark and shows an error (iirc) about $ntfs not being a valid name or can't be found.
With that information aside I was wondering if the hard disk it self had become corrupt or that the MBR (or vista equivilant now) had become corrupt. If the latter can it be restored from a DVD (like XP)or is there another way? :?
However, I've been told that there are pics and music that thus guy wants to keep on his HD without resorting to a restore - guess what, no backup afaik. I suppose I could install XP/vista to the spare partition to get it running and to fully check the disk.
