Boot problem...

Acer Aspire One, about a month old. Bios version 3305, Windows XP on SSD. No dual boot, no mods, no nothing... Just took it out of the box and started using it.

Only used to run Microsoft Office, mainly Excel. Was working fine, but just tried to boot it up tonight and it goes to the Windows XP boot screen, with the scrolling "progress" bar, and just sits there forever. The "progress" bar continues to scroll very slowly, but that is as far as it goes. I have left it sit like this for about 10 minutes, thinking it was just being slow, and it never went past this screen and the bar never quit scrolling.

If I force power off, and come back to the "Windows did not start successfully" screen, it will not load in Safe Mode (it stops loading drivers at agpCPQ.sys) and the "Last Known Good Configuration" option results in the same problem as a regular boot.

I can get into the Bios, for all the good that does, and I've tried booting without the battery installed (I thought perhaps it was a power management thing).

I searched the forums for an answer to this, to no avail. I back up my Excel data to a flashdrive, but have recently entered a bunch more data on the Aspire and I would like to at least get to a command prompt to pull my latest Excel files to save that data.
Help, please?

Additional Note (added 2.20): Using the "<alt>+<f10>" allowed me to boot one last time, and I manged to save my data and try some diagnostics. Nothing seemed out of line, but it has not booted since then.

 

I've just got a new ZG5 that does this right out of the packaging, first time I've used it. I wondered why XP was taking forever to load (stuck with slow scrolling progress bar thing) and restarted in safe mode to find the last driver loaded was the agpcpq.sys.

There is a web page on the subject here:

http://www.etcwiki.org/wiki/AgpCPQ.sys_freeze

I'm going to try updating the BIOS to 3310 as presumably the shipped bios is rather out of date.

As a workaround, it might be possible to use a USB FreeDOS boot to disable ACPI by editing the installed XP's Txtsetup.sif file - section [ACPIOptions] to set ACPIEnable to 0.

There is a useful section here on the Aspire, and a potential fix if it turns out to be a corrupted filesystem problem:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic21511.html#post279995

 

No success with setting bios to defaults, or with upgrading to 3310 bios.

Managed to use a live Damn Small Linux to mount hda1 (fat32, recovery/boot partition?) and hda2 (ntfs, main system partition?). Can only find txtsetup.sif in hda1 under minint, and changing the ACPIEnable to 0 makes no difference, nor does commenting out the line for agpcpq.sys

Edit: Just found another txtsetup.sif on hda2, under I386/TXTSETUP.SIF (my search being case sensitive missed it). Now if only I can find a way to edit the NTFS filesystem file...

 

OK!

I followed the instructions here to make a bootable System Rescue USB drive:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manu ... om_Windows

After mounting the NTFS partion and editing the I386/TXTSETUP.SIF to disable ACPIEnable, it is now booting happily and proceeding with the initial XP install.

Edit: XP install complete, ACPI battery control and standby on closing lid etc seems to be working as expected.