Quick background; I work at a first level IT call center, which also works on employee personal computers. I'm not always the most comfortable working on laptops, but I had one assigned to me.
I have an Acer Aspire 5735Z that refuses to get into Vista. I come upon a black screen with a blinking cursor. I've been doing some research regarding this issue, and I've been trying a number of things over the past few hours. This includes pulling the hard drive, verifying that it would connect on another computer (which another computer did read it easily, recreating the MBR, then attempting to rebuild the boot sector.
A few other things to note; I cannot get a USB Hiren's drive to work (and it is verified to work), despite changing out the boot order, nor will a Hiren's boot CD work; however, a Vista CD will read just fine and boot into the recovery console.
When I attempted to rebuild the boot sector, I get this error.
"The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted."
It appears to read the physical data on the drive, but it appears its having a problem doing anything else beyond that. I ran a chkdsk command and it did not find any errors on the disk.
Anyway, I am starting to lean towards a failing connection on the motherboard, especially with the issues that I had with the USB drive. (The error given with Hiren's is "PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable" then "PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE Rom")
Pretty much at a loss here as to anything else I should try. Any help would be appreciated.
