Windows will not start

Yes, new user and all. I would like to first say that yes I looked around, but you have no obvious "YO, troubleshooting questions here" forum, so I'm posting this here. Please move this thread to the appropriate forum if necessary.

My sister has an Acer Aspire and recently came across an issue. It would go to the Windows XP login screen, and when ever you would try to select the user, the computer would restart and go back to the login screen. So I went into safe mode and tried to scan for viruses/spyware. AVG free was on there, but I was unable to boot it. I also could not uninstall it or install a newer version. So, I downloaded spybot search and destroy. I did a scan, it found some stuff and took care of everything it found. So, I got to restart, and now it stuck on a black screen. It won't even get to the windows loading screen. Also, when I try to enter any of the Safe Modes, it will get stuck on one of the drivers as it's loading.

After some time googling the problem, I found the only way to fix this problem was to either repair the driver using an install disc, do a fresh install of windows, or physically remove the hard drive and fix it using another computer. I can do none of this seeing as it is a netbook. Any help would be appreciated.

 

First of all, welcome to the forums, hope you enjoy your stay...

Firstly, probably the easiest method, would be to go buy an external USB DVD-RW, pop your XP disk in there, and run the repair. Simple as that, another plus to buying an External USB DVD-RW is that you will now have access to CD/DVD media whenever you need to.

Secondly, If you have a USB Flash drive, you can configure it to be bootable, and run a repair-installation of Windows XP from there. A simple google search for "Install Windows XP from USB Drive" should bring you some good results. I did a quick search on our forums here but meh, i can be lazy sometimes. UnfortunatelyI haven't played with XP all that much since Vista was released, so I haven't kept up on it, or kept an eye on any developments.

 

That wouldn't work for me though, because with it being a netbook, it didn't come with a Windows install disc. Would I still need a copy of Windows to do the usb method?

 

Yup, any method where you want to do a restore from media, you're gonna need an XP Disk. Basically you can't repair Windows, without a Windows Source (CD/disk image)

If you look in the manual it should tell you how to perform a system recovery. Most of these li'l rigs come with a hidden "recovery" partition on the hard drive, but this method will pretty much wipe out your files etc.