Acer Aspire 5315 black screen help needed.

hi guys

ok the spec is

windows vista(pre-installed)

acer aspire 5315
intel celeron 530
1.73 ghz 533 mhz fsb 1mb L2 cache
1gb ddr, 80g hdd

problem is

got the laptop off my dad saying there is a problem with it, he had installed limewire, and utorrent, so i removed them.

restarted the laptop and on boot up it shows the acer logo etc but the goes on to a black screen with a flashing underscore in the top left corner.

if i press F2 i can go to the menu,
i have tried F8 for safe mode, and it doesnt work.

i am trying to get a vista disk off a friend to try and recover what maybe fixable.

so what do you think the problem is.

many thanks

terry

 

try pressing ALT F10 durring startup....

it sounds like the laptop has either lost it's master boot record,
or the entire hard-drive has lost it's partition information.

the ALT-F10 will start the automatic recovery if the hidden recovery partition is still there..... if that doesn't work you'll have to come up w/ an installation CD for the OS of your choice.

goodluck,
bigozone

 

ive just tried the alt-f10 and nothing has happened.

is there a way i can run comm prompt and run from there

 

you either need to get a Vista disk,, or make an XP install disk.... either way it sounds like you won't be able to recover much if anything,,,, good luck w/ that.. but if it were me, i'd just boot off an OS install disk and setup whatever flavor of windows you choose.

later,
bigozone

 

i think you need to hold Fn button down wile pressing the F10 button... that should start the restore function.... sorry said the ALT key in previous posts...

try that