I have an "interesting" problem, possibly hardware related:
An oldish laptop (acer 8930), after being left to gather dust for many months, is now consistently refusing to fully boot.
Behavior is peculiar:
- Booting the original Vista fails with a hard reset (no messages, no BSOD).
- Booting in "safe mode" succeeds with no apparent problems (so I could back up whatever "useful" was there).
- Memory is apparently ok (memtest+ did 5+ passes finding nothing bad).
- Restore to factory fails while loading drivers.
- Booting a recovery cd (linux) fails in different ways depending on actual kernel booted:
- sometimes it resets the same way Win does
- sometimes it hangs right after setting up the RTC (showing the right date&time).
My provisional diagnosis is I have some peripheral malfunctioning (HW) throwing havoc when "disturbed" by the driver, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the problem.
Target would be to find the broken interface and, if it is non-essential (as it would seem from safe-mode booting) to exclude it somehow (I know how to do it under Linux, probably it's possible to do something similar even in win?)
Can someone help, please?
An oldish laptop (acer 8930), after being left to gather dust for many months, is now consistently refusing to fully boot.
Behavior is peculiar:
- Booting the original Vista fails with a hard reset (no messages, no BSOD).
- Booting in "safe mode" succeeds with no apparent problems (so I could back up whatever "useful" was there).
- Memory is apparently ok (memtest+ did 5+ passes finding nothing bad).
- Restore to factory fails while loading drivers.
- Booting a recovery cd (linux) fails in different ways depending on actual kernel booted:
- sometimes it resets the same way Win does
- sometimes it hangs right after setting up the RTC (showing the right date&time).
My provisional diagnosis is I have some peripheral malfunctioning (HW) throwing havoc when "disturbed" by the driver, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the problem.
Target would be to find the broken interface and, if it is non-essential (as it would seem from safe-mode booting) to exclude it somehow (I know how to do it under Linux, probably it's possible to do something similar even in win?)
Can someone help, please?
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