ASUS U43 Boot Issue

Hey guys, a friend of mine foolishly installed some software that essentially destroyed her OS, after trying to navigate her over the phone to the System Recovery tools and restore a system point she couldnt do it and now its gotten to the point where windows, even using my install disc, cannot see the HDD and/or just hangs and freezes when trying to boot.

The Bios can still see it, so I tried bootrec /scanos in both IDE and ACHI mode and nothing. Any ideas?

I am thinking she just destroyed her HDD beyond recovery. Getting the current windows install to work again doesnt really matter at this point, I cannot even install a new copy.

Thanks again for any help.

 

Try a linux livecd/liveusb, ubuntu CD iso image or unetbootin for USB.

Use the disk utility or gparted to see if the drive has a recursive partition or some other kind of funky partition table corruption.

 

I'm not too familiar with most any linux distro as of yet, or linux in general; so thanks AllurGroceries, but what exactly will this tell me, and if it does have some messed up partition table (which I thought bootrec /fixmbr would take care of but didnt), how do I fix it with the livecd?

 

A livecd would let you troubleshoot a potential hardware issue or maybe a partitioning problem.

If you can see the disk and its partition layout using the livecd's disk utilities, you at least know the drive is not totally dead.