Acer Aspire 3680 OS installation issue... Baffled!!

[diesel43078]

Have an Acer Aspire 3680 laptop with Vista Home Basic that crashed and will not boot to the OS. I at first suspected a failing HDD, so I swapped it out and tried to install the OS on another drive. This did not resolve the issue, and couldn't get the OS installed on a known good drive either. The OS installation will run all the way to the point where the PC shuts down after loading all the installation files, and then will not finish the installation. It comes back up to the screen where it says windows could not start successfully... yada yada yada. Was periodically getting a BSOD when it attempted to boot, said something about a verification issue. Sorry I can't be any more specific than that, never could catch exactly what it said. Did some research and came across a few posts that indicated it may be a RAM issue, so I ran a memtest and it looked ok. Just to be sure, I took out one of the RAM modules and attempted to install the OS again, then repeated this process with the other RAM module, still to no avail. Then repeated this process with the original HDD, and still nothing. I'm a little lost with this one. Have tried 2 HDD's, swapped out RAM, ran system repairs from the OS installation disk, and tried to install 2 different OS's in a number of combinations, and still can't get this thing running. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[BigSteve702]

i'd start with going into bios and making sure ahci support is turned off for your boot options (you might not even have the option to change this)

if its already turned off, try turning it on. or try setting it to sata only, or ide only. again, im not sure what options your bios really has

if that doesnt do it, do the ram dance. just try running one stick at a time, if that doesnt rule out, try ruling out the ram slots next.

if nothing gets it to not bluescreen from there, your sata controller on the board is probably crapping out

 

[diesel43078]

i'd start with going into bios and making sure ahci support is turned off for your boot options (you might not even have the option to change this)

if its already turned off, try turning it on. or try setting it to sata only, or ide only. again, im not sure what options your bios really has

if that doesnt do it, do the ram dance. just try running one stick at a time, if that doesnt rule out, try ruling out the ram slots next.

if nothing gets it to not bluescreen from there, your sata controller on the board is probably crapping out

I ruled out the RAM by testing it with each stick individually. Also, I got XP to install on the second HDD, but not Vista or 7. Even though XP is running, it's not running very well. It's having trouble writing to the HDD for updates and such. I'm thinking there may be something to you SATA controller theory.