aspire one won't boot up

I bought my daughter an acer aspire one with windows xp and the 120 gb hard drive for Christmas. She used it for a few hours and it shut itself down. When trying to restart the computer she gets the black screen saying that windows did not start successfully giving the options of starting in various Safe Modes, Last Known Good Configuration, or Start Windows Normally. No matter what option is chosen it it flashes to the black Acer screen then back to the black screen saying windows did not start succesfully. How do I get the computer to start up? Thank You

 

It seems that the files that are required for booting up windows are damaged somehow. This could be because of accidental file deletion, viruses or even shutting the computer off whilst it is in the middle of something. Id suggest you boot from a Windows XP cd/usb and use the repair method. If your daughter hasnt saved anything important/or you can easily set it up again, then you can just reinstall windows. Hope that helps.

 

I had that same problem. And I was able to follow the XP Bootable USB thread here to get it done. I suggest that you download the Unofficial ACER XP recovery disk from these boards as well. Works great and if you follow the Guide and Walk through with PDF. It's a lot simpler than it looks.

 

Try that first:
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer ... overy.html

 

First of all, do not follow the instruction from duablo. Doing so will void your warranty and potentially permanently bricking your Acer aspire one. Also, it doesn't fix your problem.

The fastest way is to just do a full system recovery with acer d2d recovery

1.restart/turn on your computer
2.press and hold F2 key right after you press the power button
3.go into the bios and find d2d recovery option and make sure it is enabled, if it's disabled, enable it, then save the bios
4. restart
5. press and hold alt+F10 key right after you pressed the power button
6. follow the on screen instruction
the entire process should take you no longer than 20 minutes.

 

Why would flashing an official Acer bios on an Acer machine void your warranty?? Surely they're meant to be used, since Acer put 'em up on their site. :roll:

 

Well... the link duablo gave is the "bios recovery", a guide to a improper way of flashing the bios.
The correct way to flash the bios is to use a dos boot disk and flash bios through DOS.

By using the bios recovery method to update the bios, there's a chance of corrupting the bios and "bricking" the laptop.

 

First, I didn't post any link. Second, Acer certainly wouldn't be able to deny you warranty service if you used their BIOS file on the correct Acer machine.

 

sorry, i was referring to the link that duablo posted