Vista won't Start, Screen Hangs at Flashing Cursor

I have a 10-month old Acer 5100-3372 that won't go into Windows now (Vista Home Premium).

A few nights ago I noticed the machine was at a black screen DOS style screen with white text. I think it must've reboot spontaneously (?). The screen had some explanation about the restart being unsuccessful. One of the choices was to let Windows search the hard disk for errors. I chose this but it didn't seem to start after watching it for several minutes. So I rebooted the PC and the same black screen with the restart choices displayed.

So I said forget this, I have a backup. I tried restoring a backup of the hard drive I made with Acronis True Image (I booted off the True Image CD). I chose to only restore just the C: partition. Both times I tried, it gets to over 50% complete then there's a message about the image being corrupt. (@#$! Acronis was all I could think at that moment)

So I shut down the PC. When I power it up, the Acer logo screen displays for a few seconds, then the screen turns black and there's a flashing cursor in the upper left corner. The hard drive LED next to the power switch keeps flashing. Thinking maybe it was just a slow startup, I left it this way for hours and it stayed hung up.

I can go into the Acer Recovery mode (press ALT-F10 during the Acer logo screen) and restore the system default backup. It finishes OK. Then the PC restarts but the same problem happens when it comes up. I've tried this twice.

I also have Acer Recovery DVDs which I created when I purchased the PC. I can boot the laptop off of these and restore them (2 DVDs). The restore works OK, but again, when the PC reboots it hangs again. I've tried this several times.

I've also went into BIOS and changed the boot order around but this didn't help. I also reset the BIOS to defaults - no help.

This problem started 2 nights ago. I have not installed any new hardware. I don't think any new software was installed at that time (several people use this laptop) but I'm not 100% sure. Anyways the system default restore would alleviate any issues with that I would think.

The other thing I tried was booting off an Ubuntu 7.10 live CD - it boots OK and can see the laptop's C: partition and also another partition (called 'PQ' or 'PQ-something').

Does anyone have any ideas?

It seems like something is preventing the hard drive from booting into Vista.

thanks!!!

 

Run chkdsk.

 

sounds like HD is damaged or the raid drivers are missing.
you could try going into the bios and loading bios default settings.

but first run chkdsk.