Acer Aspire One – Fixing No Boot Problem

acer-aspire-one-blueA friend of mine has one of these very cool looking notebooks running Windows XP. However it developed a problem in that when you turned it on, nothing happened, you could however hear the hard-drive working away like it was loading up windows and then stopping.

After trying out the notebook on a PC monitor and trying to find a USB or network cable to use to connect to another working Laptop nothing seemed to work. So i said id take it home and mess around with it, messing around meant id try to get it to work even though i had no idea.

The first thing i did and always do when there is a problem with anything is i Google it. So off i went to google and typed in;

“acer aspire one wont turn on”

Simple really i typed in the exact name and model of the notebook and what was wrong and the first result lead me to a site which had a fix;

Acer Aspire One BIOS Recovery

And by following the intructions it brought the notebook back to life amazingly and it only took about 5 mins, amazign what you find when you google it.

Windows Vista & Windows 7 Setup Problems -“unable to create new system partition or locate a existing system partition”

windows_vista_logo.pngI came home from college yesterday and decided for some reason to install windows 7 64bit that i had downloaded.  Having already tried out the BETA and RC1 (Release Candidate 1) i thought sure i may as well.  Already having Two versions of vista running 64bit and 32bit and well used to dual-booting windows what should have talking 40 mins ended up being a complete disaster and took much of the afternoon.

Having my main Vista installation installed on one of the many partitions on my hard drive, the drive letter being “F:”. I delete the C: drive partition and had planned to install Windows 7 over the C Drive.

For some unknown reason my PC was not letting me install Windows 7 or Vista. So when i rebooted back i got the message;

“BOOTMGR is missing
Press CTRL ALT DELETE to restart”

I kept getting the same setup error during the install process. “unable to create new system partition or locate a exsisting system partition”.

I tried everything to get windows back up and running, i still had a full working Vista isntallation sitting on one of the partition drives but i could not get to it for reasons i cant figure out.  Installation my main OS on a drive letter other than the C Drive was not good idea and this probably caused some of the problems. But the fact that i couldnt get any new Windows OS to install made things very difficult. Ive had this problem before and its got something to with the motherboard i have or the combination of SATA/IDE drives.

After about 6 hours of madness and throwing DVD’s into the PC including;

  • An atempt to recover the c drive with Norton ghost 14
  • Windows vista reinstall
    windows Vista Repair (which was the solution that is for the BOOTMGR is missing problem, which didnt work as Vista could not the see the Vista installtion i had).
  • windows 7 install
  • windows 7 Repair

Nothing worked, Vista Repair let me down big time and even my norton ghost which is usually very good at restoring backups wouldnt work.

So i picked up the motherboard manual and looked at the back of it to see if i had written down anything t hat might help and of course i did. “Disable the IDE Drives”. I did this and i got things working again.

There is something wrong with either the motherboard (The motherboard i have is a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H), BIOS (latest version) or combination of SATA drives and IDE drives i have. I dont know what that problem is but im guessing its got something to with some settings in the BIOS. Im running my SATA Drives in IDE Native mode rather than i expect the better “AHCI Mode”.

Team Fortress 2 – Is Awesome

team-fortress-2Since i got bored of World of Warcraft after the last huge patch, (well i logged in and seen there was nothing do really apart from one new confusing Battleground) ive been playing Valves Superb Team Fortress 2.

Its a lot of fun with great choice of classes and maps. Ive been mainly playing the one map however CTF_2FORT on the same server for the last couple of months. Now anyone that knows that map knows its a very small compact map that doest give a lot of room to hide or run around especially when the server is a 32 player server.

Ive had some great games on that server and met some great people and some complete assholes of course. Most of the time im an “Engineer” building up my sentry gun and fixing other peoples. Nowadays im anything but an “Engineer”, been playing “Spy” quite a bit at the moment which is great fun if you get lucky and do it right.

Firefox – Must Have Addons

firefox_I love Firefox, the new 3.5 version is much better than previous ones as its much faster with less crashing. Firefox is great because its the only Web Browser i know that says “hey, view thew web your way and dont take no pop-ups or allow any addons to install with asking me first”. But yet still people use IE, im not saying IE ias bad recent versions have come a long way but i still dont trust Microsofts Internet Explorer.

The horror stories where people have lost there World of Warcraft Accounts,Steam Accounts etc are usually down to Internert Explorer and No FireWall and Anti-Virus Software.

So here im listing some of the addons/Extensions i uses with Firefox.

Security:

1) AddBlock Plus
Blocks annoying adverts,pop-ups etc.

2)NoScript
Blocks Dangerous scripts from running on websites that could potentially damage your PC.

For General Use:

1)Realplayer Browser Record Plugin
For easy Downloading of Youtube Videos. Plus the new RealplayerSP allows you to conver your downloaded videos to your Ipod.PSP,Phone and more.

2) Google Toolbar
For quick links to Gmail and other Google Features.

3)FlashGot
For quick downloading of Files great for use with GetRight.

4)Scribe Fire:
For quick easy access to posting on your Blog.

5)XMarks:
This would be number one only yhat it doesnt seem to wrk well for me and just crashes firefox. It keeps a backup of your Bookmarks on the XMarks server.