A bad day with the laptop . . . NLC

[David]

A bad day today - my usual log on this morning was greeted with a black screen I tried to boot in safe mode but that option was not there it only offered to repair start-up which failed at every atempt. Eventually I gave up and used a recovery disc I'd made (and used before) but this time my DVD drive and a hard drive partitions are missing. My head now hurts

Anyone any ideas? It's an old Acer laptop running vista

[campbell]

Vista eh.

Avoid.

Check the spec for Windows 7.

Or go back to XP

Or go Linux. What better opportunity will you get!

[robin]

Did it manage to boot the recovery DVD at all?

When you say the drive and partition are "missing" do you mean once booted into the recovery DVD or do you mean once booted back into VIsta having completed the recovery?

If you boot from power down (i.e. press and hold power key for 4s to force off, then press again to boot up) and enter the BIOS setup screen (often F2, F10, F12 or DEL during early part of boot up) then you ought in there to be able to see what DVD drive and hard disk it has discovered - often this is visible in the boot sequence menu as it shows you which devices it will boot from and often lists the model names of the devices actually discovered (so instead of saying DISK0 it might say "WD 892093 TURBO NUTTER"

Cheers,
Robin

[David]

Thanks Robin. I could see the drive in the bois boot list and also managed to see the partition somewhere in the device manager so knew they still existed. The recovery disk brought me back to the factory settings and the drives and partitions were all there initially but 'empty' and they soon deleted themselves (vista? ). Anyway my son eventually found the paths and drive letters had been deleted and was able to re-assign these and all came good.

I believe the problem was caused by malware in a phishing MacAfee email that I stupidly clicked a link on . MacAfee spammed it and then deleted on the reinstalling of their software. If anyone gets a MacAffe email, or pop up, saying their account is out of date I suggest they delete it and check their account without using a link.

Windows 7 upgrade I think is called for

[campbell]

Good effort all round though David.

Fecking computers eh. Who needs 'em.