Acer Aspire 5733 - No boot

[Connor.S]

I'm attempting to fix an Acer Aspire 5733 that has been stepped on; it was open, foot stepped right on the keyboard. I tore the whole laptop into pieces to see what the damage was. The only visible physical damage is the keyboard itself. Motherboard isn't cracked, no wires disconnected, everything still connected and in tact as it were before.

Upon trying to boot up it flashes the Acer boot screen that says press F2 for setup. It will show this screen for about 5 seconds, then shutdown and reboot itself over and over until I remove the battery. I can press Esc to flash another screen that shows some read outs and also says press F2 for setup; this screen will also only show for about 5 seconds then reboot.

I've tried repeatedly pressing multiple keys, like F8 to bring up the Advanced Boot Options menu, but it doesn't work. After pressing any key 10 or so times each key press produces a loud beep.

I've tried plugging the sata hdd into my laptop via sata to usb and it prompts me that the drive needs to be formatted. I read a couple places that some drives always say this because they can't connect via sata to usb. So I then plugged it in to my desktop through sata port and it only shows me an empty 100mb reserved portion of the drive, its a 500gb drive. I'm not sure whether or not the drive is actually damaged.

Could a faulty CPU cause this automatic reboot without the possibility of booting past the bios screen?

I'm really just looking for any help or answers any of you may have.

Sorry for the lengthy post and thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Connor.S]

I think I answered it for myself. I don't know why I didn't think of trying to boot without the hdd to see if it would POST.

Booted with no hdd and problem solved. It POSTs and tells me there is no hard drive; either insert an hdd or disk to boot from.

Seeing as my laptop and desktop recognized the hdd do you think I could reformat the drive and do a fresh install?

 

[spirit]

Seeing as my laptop and desktop recognized the hdd do you think I could reformat the drive and do a fresh install?

Yes, I'd give it a go and see if you can get an OS installed on your drive.

 

[Connor.S]

Thanks for the input.

I've come up with another idea, and have no idea how it will turn out.

Remove the drive, boot up, pop in the OS cd, then put the drive back in once the OS cd loads. Maybe there is a slight chance it will recognize the drive and I can either repair or start a fresh install and end up with a Windows.old folder containing all the data I don't want to lose. Who knows..

 

[Connor.S]

I didn't have much hope in that idea working..it didn't.

Now I'm starting to think the drive is totally done for. While trying to format I receive Data Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check...

 

[johnb35]

The drive is bad, replace it.

 

[Connor.S]

Just to double check, I can replace it with any 2.5" drive correct? As long as I format and install Windows of course.

 

[wolfeking]

yea. any SATA 2.5 inch drive will work on it as long as it fits in the drive bay. Some laptops will not use the larger 1TB drives because of the height of the drive, just be careful of that.