Acer 4820TG not booting!

Hi guys, I am looking at a friend's Acer 4820TG and it doesn't want to boot into any OS. When I use the Windows 7 installation disc to re-install the OS. It would refuse to install on the HDD. It would say Windows cannot be installed on this partition or something like that. I use a ubuntu live cd and choose try ubuntu without installing and the screen would just go black with a _ blinking on the left. If I don't insert any disc the pc will just boot up and freeze after the bios screen with a non-blinking _

I also noticed with the non-blinking _ there are 3 small squared artifact in the top left, top middle, and top right of the screen.

Does anybody know what the problem is?

Sometimes booting with the windows 7 cd would just freeze when the animation comes up where the Windows 7 logo is.

 

You have to be more specific than this. What was your friend doing on the 4820TG before it started to black screen? installing new drivers? messing with partitions? etc.

Linux (bootable live CD) will not boot up on the 4820TG because of switchable graphics. Not sure if changing to "discrete graphics" in the BIOs will help.

 

Sounds like a faulty RAM to me. Try DDR3 RAM from another computer, or try to boot with each stick individually.

Also might be a problem with HDD, but I doubt it, since Ubuntu doesn't load.

Good luck!

 

This is not true, I installed ubuntu 10.04 from a live cd when I got my 4820TG a month ago.

 

Really? I tried booting up Ubuntu 10.10 on my 4820TG and it froze up on me before booting into the OS. That's strange.

So, ignore my previous comment because maybe it's just my computer that acting funny with Ubuntu.

 

Could be 10.10. I tried to install 10.10 on my toshiba T235D and it wouldn't boot up there either. OTOH, my friend with an Aspire A0521 has to run 10.10 as 10.04 won't work on it. Oh well, I just remember that in order to install 10.04 I had booted from the live CD on my 4820TG first to see if it worked. I should try a 10.10 CD just to see if it was a one time issue for you or if it affects all 4820TGs.

 

Well.. I found the problem. Really weird. I had to turn the SATA mode to IDE mode in the BIOS. It worked fine after that. When I switch it back again to AHCI mode it will get stuck with the little artifact again not even booting into windows. BIOS problem or the controller? Thanks for the help guys!

 

It is a driver problem, you have to get AHCI Driver activated before installing Windows 7.

 

Hi guys

I have the exact same problem. Changing from AHCI --> IDE in the BIOS also helped me, but only a little. I was now able to boot a little "further", but I still can't access windows. I've tried everything - including a restore factory default in the BIOS and a reinstallment of windows. But no luck.

Hope someone can help me. I'm desperate, and Acer's customer support really sucks

 

Hi guys,

I had the same problem. No boot and no Windows re-install possible. Three small artifacts displayed on an otherwise blank screen. Took it back to Acer and they copied a cloned Windows onto the drive to get it going again. Got it back and 4 hours later it locked-up with the HD light on solid. It's been doing this off/on for 10 months. I'm totally sick of it. Lost a load of work due to these lockups.

Took a video of the latest lock-up and it's now back at Acer repair again.

I'll let you know how it goes but am thinking of putting in a 120GB SSD if it ever stops crashing.

 

Have you done an error check on the HDD to see if this is not the cause. Download something like HDTUNE and check the S.M.A.R.T status, also check for bad sectors on the HDD. Do you know if ACER tested the drive, or just put windows on?

 

I would suspect bad sectors on the HD. Load a clean version of W7 on a 4 gb bootable thumbdrive. See if it will boot from the drive and see if it will load from the thumb. Here is a clean install guide. http://forum.notebookreview.com/6465732-post1612.html It's about a year old, so I'm not sure the links are still good. If you get stuck, feel free to pm. BTW, microsoft also has a thumbdrive loader program.

 

Really sounds like a bummer HDD, likely not anything else. Do also try removing the ram, and only placing one stick at a time in, it is very common for weird issues such as these to occur from one bad, or poorly connected RAM sitck.