Acer Aspire 5920 Won't Boot & No CDs From Dealer

I have a very frustrating story about an Aspire 5920. When I purchased it from a chain electronics store, I did not receive any OS CD/DVD or any other disks with it. Now it got to the point where it had slowed down to a crawl, I went to do a system restore (Vista Home Premium) to the earliest point which was set on 24 Aug 09, and I when it went to reboot itself it is now stuck on Start Windows Normally and if I select it, it just cycles back to Start Windows Normally after about 15 seconds. I've been doing that for the past two hours. I've hit F5 to get to a screen that allows me to choose F8 and get to safe mode and other selections and all of them take me back to Start Windows Normally and the endless cycle from hell. Of course I have no CD to boot from, so I have no choices at this point. The extremely curious thing is that I know another couple of people who bought the exact same model from the same retailer and none of them got disks. The retailer apparently told one of them that Acer doesn't ship OS disks with this model. I find that hard to believe. Can anyone assist! Please! Help!

Thanks for your reply, but I've tried that and all I get is the Start Windows Normally cycle again. I don't know what key I haven't hit yet!

No one I know who got the same Acer has the CD. Would any Vista home premium disk do?

There are about 3GB of completely irreplaceable photos on that HD. Is there any way to boot off of a USB key or some other way to retrieve those UNBACKEDUP photos before reinitializing everything. I don't care about anything else on that drive except the pix. Thanks!

Unfortunately the only paperwork I got with this Acer was the cash register receipt. I got absolutely nothing but the laptop and the charger.

That's the amazing thing. It's from a major electronics chain with at least 15 locations here in Italy. It was packed in the box, but it's obvious that it had been previously opened since there was nothing in there but the laptop and charger and packing material! And the two guys I know who bought the same one got exactly the same thing! Hard to believe!

Saugen48: Nastygram on the way! I was using AVG free which I have used without any problem for several years on all sorts of PCs. All of the symptoms seemed to be consistent with a virus and I planned to run Spybot S&D after the system restore, but of course I was never able to.

ghn: It just turns out that I do have a USB external, a Fujitsu 160GB 2.5 external that I use for backups. So what I should do is open up the case, take the internal HD out, open up the Fuji, take its drive out, and place the laptop's internal in there? Do I have to do anything in setting jumpers or ??? Also can I open up the Acer with regular tools, and is there anything I should know specifically about doing that? I know that laptops are rather finicky about how they're opened.

Thanks for all the info and the good wishes, as I'll need all the luck I can get! I'll let you know how it works out! I appreciate all the help!

Success! It was a bit of a runaround, but everything is back. Here's what I did:

- Yanked the HD out of the laptop. Yanked the HD out of my external Fujitsu case. Put the laptop HD in the Fuji. Hooked it up to my desktop and copied all those precious photo files. Now I could breathe easier.

- Now I tried to revive the laptop. I put the HD back into the laptop, then I got a Vista Recovery Disk ISO on my desktop PC. Very strangely my Vista 64bit Home Premium refused to burn a CD, with Vista utilities, ISO BURN, etc. I never burn CDs or DVDs, so that was the first time I tried with the desktop PC. Something about a pre SP1 problem which is ridiculous as my desktop is updated to the minute. I even downloaded the microsoft hotfix and when I tried to install it, all it said is that my system didn't need it. Ya, but it didn't work either! Thankfully 7 is out today and it looks like I'll be an early adopter!

- I got HP USB Disk Storage Utility and turned my 4GB USB flash drive into FAT32. Then I got Virtual Clone Drive and created an Vista Recovery Disk ISO on the HD, that I then copied onto the USB key.

- I went into the BIOS and changed around the boot options so that USB Flash was first. I rebooted, stuck the USB drive in and it gave me choice to repair Vista. I went through system repair then it asked me if I wanted to do System Restore. There was only one point, so I chose it and crossed my fingers. 5 minutes later, I rebooted to Vista, absolutely perfect and exactly the way I left it!

THANK GAWD!

Thanks again for all the help! Couldn't have done it without ya! I really appreciate it!