Problems with recovery disks on Ferrari 3400

Hi folks...

I'm trying to bring an old Ferrari 3400 back to life using the recovery disks. It doesn't have the original hard disk, instead it has a 30GB drive that used to have linux on it.

The drive itself seems fine and I can install and use linux (fedora) on it with no problems at all.

However, if I use the Acer 3400 recovery disks, the recovery process seems to complete successfully but on reboot, the BIOS fires up as normal and it seems to try and boot - but it just sits there with a blinking text mode cursor on a blank screen (no error message, nothing - just "hangs" there).

Clearly its either not detecting the "recovered" image as bootable or something else is amiss - maybe the stripped down recovery s/w can't understand the drive geometry or doesn't setup the MBR or something.

I tried making sure the drive was configured with a single active primary partition spanning the entire disk and indeed the recovery s/w seems happy enough to restore to the hard disk - but it won't boot at all.

Anyone have any similar experiences? Do I need to partition the disk in some special way (is it expecting a certain logical layout and just not complaining?) As the disk itself is fine and I can install/boot other OS'es, I suspect there's something about the configuration that the recovery s/w is expecting but isn't telling me

I want to restore the system, rather than use linux, because I want to give this laptop to my daughter who is visually impaired and she uses Windows both for her touch typing training s/w etc.. Plus she's accustomed to navigating within that OS environment (she's only 8).

I'd be grateful for any ideas!!

 

try a reboot making sure HDD is first boot option.then when you re-boot hold the Ctrl key down.on my wifes old travelmate that starts it in to safe mode.
if that works you may find out what is wrong.
if that dosn't work use the F8 at boot that should also launch the option screen for safe mode.

give it a bash,

 

this ones a bit tricky but has worked for me.
If after several attempts you are unable to get into Windows XP Safe Mode as the computer is booting into Windows, turn off your computer. When the computer is turned on the next time Windows should notice that the computer did not successfully boot and give you the Safe Mode screen.
lets try and get it started then we can find out why the problems

she's only 8 so in two years she's going to want a better,faster and pink laptop

 

maybe there is a corruption on the RC disk... if you have any retail disk that might work better.

PS. smart move with putting windows back on, I too can't see well, and I require a magnifier(Zoomtext), I tried linux a couple weeks ago and it is just horrible compared to windows, in this regard, and the screen reader was worse than JAWS 6 in my opinion.

 

Yuio. have you tried the Ctrl+ to increase text and Ctrl- to decrease text size its one of the best short cut key combinations i have used for reading small text.
just hold the Ctrl key down and tap the plus + .

enjoy.

 

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll give it a try (I strongly suspect it's not getting far enough to even load the windows bootloader). If only I had another machine with a second 2.5" bay where I could mount the disk and poke around to see what's actually there!

Alas I don't have a retail copy. I will probably have to buy one and download all the drivers I need for this platform from the Acer website.

BTW, ctrl+/ctrl- don't work universally unfortunately. For example, those key combinations have no effect in "My Computer", Notepad, etc. although they're definitely handy in browsers and mail clients that support them. Flash based web sites tend to be some of the worst offenders for assuming everyone has the same vision

Thanks to all for taking the time to reply, it's appreciated!