AOD250 Not finishing bootup sequence

I am attempting to repair my daughters D250 laptop running winXp which has a few problems. In addition to it needing a few keys and probably a new battery the more serious problem is that it can't seem to locate a video driver during bootup sequence and so it goes into a loop always ending up at the same place. When I press F2 and try a repair it goes back to the same place so none of the things offered in F2 work.

I looked into flashing a usb stick with the acer startup program and this didn't help either. I am now thinking that there is nothing wrong with the acer software, either the HDD is corrupted causing a miss and not reading the file or the file itself somehow was corrupted. Since I can't get into the program or add the driver from a disk I am at a loss.

I had looked at:

A. Possibly loading a large usb stick with a copy of Winxp qualifying it with the serial number on the computer. I am not sure of this because-1.I don't even know if I can get a copy of winxp on a usb stick, and 2. I'm not really sure if the software from windows will load from a stick (no DVD drive)

B. I could load a form of linux and hope for the best.In doing this I'm not sure if linux borrows drivers from XP upon installation of if it has its own drivers. I would completely wipe the drive IF I knew I didn't need winxp.

I have had a few bad things happen with regard to linux. In one case I attempted to load an image from an ISO burned to a CD in another laptop. The image was possibly corrupted because I didn't checksum it. In any case that took a lot of time and that particular laptop is still in its case unused. If you guys can help I might just get two usable laptops out of this deal..

I am just a little bit iffy about linux. What makes this whole thing more confusing to me is.

A. There are so many types of linux.Which one do I use???

B. If I run into something like wifi not working I have no idea what to do next. If I need a driver I need to locate it somewhere and copy it properly and make sure it goes in the correct place...all sounds simples I know, until Its me doing it lol.

I'm not looking for anyone here to hold my hand every step of the way, just maybe direct me to the most simple straight forward solution to the above problem. Many thanks in advance.

 

I would try booting a Linux distro from usb and see if that works properly. I run Fedora Linux on AO150 and AO D250 no problem with graphics, sound or wifi. Linux loads drivers without Windows help 90+% of the time.

Fedora has several desktop environments to choose from Gnome and KDE use the most resources and LXDE and Xfce use less, Those mention are the top 4 live images available and can be installed to a usb flash drive or burnt to a cd/dvd and booted from a usb cd/dvd drive. There is a Fedora LiveUSB Creator for Windows if you choose to try Fedora and there are other options for other distros such as Unetbootin.

 

Will it boot in safe mode? Linux: Gnome is dog slow and unfriendly. KDE is slow but configurable. go to distrowatch.com. top left just click on go. (dont type name) select your poison. One that popped up was PClinuxos, I have used that and it was nice.

 

I've got the first Aspire One (the A110 model).

booting with a standard Ubuntu 12.04 USB flash drive, everything is working well (wifi, webcam, sound, touchpad, etc...)