Hey everyone, I'd appreciate your help (especially considering that due to lack of money I decided not to buy an external HDD to back up my data and now I'm screwed...)
Anyway, I have Acer Aspire One (model of 2008) with Intel Atom 1 GHz, 1 Gb RAM and 150 Gb HDD, Win XP Pro.
Over the years windows crashed twice and on the last reinstall I don't remember how/why but when I reinstalled windows XP last time - it created a 5 Gb partition on HDD and istalled the system on it; leaving the other 135 Gb for personal storage. The problem was that the system itself occupied around 4 Gb and it was constantly complaining about having too little free space and the laptop was working slowly.
I was first advised to switch the HDD to "dynamic mode" using - I think - using administrative tools and then try to merge them. (I did that a month ago or so) It did not work.
Yesterday I installed Paragon Partition Manager 12 and tried to merge the two volumes. It said it was unable to perform the operation, so I switched the HDD from dynamic back to standard regime and then tried again to merge the two partitions. It launched successfully and then asked to reboot the laptop, which I did. Afterwards it just kept saying "preparing to merge, do not swtich offf the electricity" - it did so for 20 minutes or so and then there was just a blank screen. I could press any button and the laptop would reboot - enter BIOS and then just show me black screen, without loading windows. Any button pressed would reboot the laptop.
I realised I could not load or restore windows, so I downloaded Ubuntu and made a bootable USB - when I switched the boot order on laptop from HDD to USB and then it would not load and would just show white screen. It would not react to any buttons (even "power on/off" button) and would only shut down if battery were removed.
Right now this is where I am - I turn it on - it just shows white screen and nothing else. I used to be able to access Acer BIOS at least - right now it's all white, no system, no BIOS and I am clueless as to what I can do here.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks!
****************FOLLOW-UP**************** (posted on 4 March)
I asked my friend who has a desktop PC to connect the hard-drive to his computer.
BIOS noticed a new hard-drive, but when Windows XP booted, the hard drive was not visible in My Computer. We went to Hardware in Control Panel and found that there are 2 hard-drives on that PC (the first is the one that the PC was working on, and the second one is mine - it only showed 1 partition and said 150 Gb, non-allocated - and the bar was all gray (compared to blue for the hard drive that did work). My friend told me in his opinion the hard-drive had been formatted and he could not access the disk anyway.
My question is, can the data still be retrieved? are there any methods I could try? Thank you!
Anyway, I have Acer Aspire One (model of 2008) with Intel Atom 1 GHz, 1 Gb RAM and 150 Gb HDD, Win XP Pro.
Over the years windows crashed twice and on the last reinstall I don't remember how/why but when I reinstalled windows XP last time - it created a 5 Gb partition on HDD and istalled the system on it; leaving the other 135 Gb for personal storage. The problem was that the system itself occupied around 4 Gb and it was constantly complaining about having too little free space and the laptop was working slowly.
I was first advised to switch the HDD to "dynamic mode" using - I think - using administrative tools and then try to merge them. (I did that a month ago or so) It did not work.
Yesterday I installed Paragon Partition Manager 12 and tried to merge the two volumes. It said it was unable to perform the operation, so I switched the HDD from dynamic back to standard regime and then tried again to merge the two partitions. It launched successfully and then asked to reboot the laptop, which I did. Afterwards it just kept saying "preparing to merge, do not swtich offf the electricity" - it did so for 20 minutes or so and then there was just a blank screen. I could press any button and the laptop would reboot - enter BIOS and then just show me black screen, without loading windows. Any button pressed would reboot the laptop.
I realised I could not load or restore windows, so I downloaded Ubuntu and made a bootable USB - when I switched the boot order on laptop from HDD to USB and then it would not load and would just show white screen. It would not react to any buttons (even "power on/off" button) and would only shut down if battery were removed.
Right now this is where I am - I turn it on - it just shows white screen and nothing else. I used to be able to access Acer BIOS at least - right now it's all white, no system, no BIOS and I am clueless as to what I can do here.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks!
****************FOLLOW-UP**************** (posted on 4 March)
I asked my friend who has a desktop PC to connect the hard-drive to his computer.
BIOS noticed a new hard-drive, but when Windows XP booted, the hard drive was not visible in My Computer. We went to Hardware in Control Panel and found that there are 2 hard-drives on that PC (the first is the one that the PC was working on, and the second one is mine - it only showed 1 partition and said 150 Gb, non-allocated - and the bar was all gray (compared to blue for the hard drive that did work). My friend told me in his opinion the hard-drive had been formatted and he could not access the disk anyway.
My question is, can the data still be retrieved? are there any methods I could try? Thank you!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram