Lost power during System Restore now won't load to login screen!? Please help, very important.

Thanks so much for reading this. I'm in a really bad position with a non-booting PC. I desperately need this machine for the day-to day but also, immedietely, tomorrow.

Situation:
Due to what I thought were issues with SP1, I uninstalled it. Finding it not to be the case and that the uninstall left my machine somewhat "stuttery", I set it up for a system restore and went to bed. About eight hours later, I checked it and it was still restoring! I figured it had locked up (it's done this before) so I powered it off. Dumb move, I know.

Now, though, I try to start windows but it the screen gets stuck on black before it loads up the glowing windows logo. It will do the loading animation but that's it. I've tried loading Windows from CD but it doesn't make a difference. It loads the files with the DOS-like loading screen, then does the exact same thing.

I've also tried to get it to start in Safe Mode. I push the key to get there but the start-up selection screen only flashes before going right into loading Windows normally.

Please, I don't know what to do and I desperately need this machine to get anything done. It's just outside of warranty, so if there's any way for me to fix this myself I'd like to try.

Some things I've wondered about:

1) Is there a for sure way to get into the start-up selection screen?
2) Can I format the HDD with FDISK and then load windows from my vista cd and have it reinstall?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

1. To get to Windows StartUp Menu, just start to hit F8 like crazy when you power on your laptop till you get to the menu. If you have the ACER screen enabled showing when you power on your laptop, start pressing F8 right after that screen disappears.
2. Yeah, I don't see why not, you even don't need fdisk, you can format it with the Vista's CD. You know formatting a partition destroy all the data on it right?

 

Do you have the recovery disks? If so, go into the bios and set it to boot from the DVD drive first. Place the recovery disks in the drive and reboot. It should start the restore from there.

 

Hey Guys,

Thanks for getting back to me. I don't know what was going on but I got it to reboot using the drive to drive (D2D) method. I reviewed some documentation and it looks like Acer laptops store a restore partition right on the HDD.

I did the f8 option a bunch of times but it would only flash the menu before going into a normal boot. I also tried just entering the restore CDs but it would just load the files from the CD and never get to the actual restore.

What I found out though is since there's an existing restore partition, if you hold ALT at the acer post-bios screen and press F10 repeatedly, it bypasses everything and moves to a restore. It looks like it's going to boot windows but actually boots into the Acer restore utility.

So, I'm good to go again. Thanks for your help! You're all always so informative.