Hello,
As I review this, prior to posting, I realized what a long write it was. I guess the old frustrations from this fiasco came boiling out.
I have some experience with this (unfortunately). A month or so after I purchased my Acer Aspire 4720Z, I was transferring data from an older desktop computer. The Acer is on Vista, the destop was on XP.
As I was reviewing what data to transfer and what to discard, I came across an old XP registry file, that apparently I had saved, 'cause I had added a date to the title itself. So I decided to look at the file to see what it contained. BIG MISTAKE !!!
I was doing all of this from the new laptop. It immediately went to reboot. When it tried to load up Windows, the error message came up, in Dos form, something to the effect of 'your computer did not shut down normally, do you want to boot up in Dos Command, Windows Safe Mode, or Normally?'
It didn't matter, what ever I selected, the laptop would then repeat the cycle. It would shut down, and go back to the same Dos window 'your computer did not shut down normally ...'.
After quite a few repeated attempts at every option, and other attempts at holding F2 down during startup, I contacted a tech friend who had me try holding F8 down during startup, to no success. So I needed to make contact with Acer.
To make matters worse, I was not online at the time, and was at a location where an internet connection was not nearby. I could not use my laptop to look up the Acer contact info I had saved, and that data was not on the older desktop.
All I had left was my cell phone. Dialing 800 information and telling the computer voice prompt "Acer" gave me a number that wanted credit card information and wanted to charge me something like $2.95 a minute for tech support !!!
I knew this wasn't right. My laptop was still under warranty. So I kept trying on the cell phone. Eventually I found a good phone number for Acer, but it was a California area code. I am on the East Coast of the USA, and California time is several hours prior, and it was early in the morning. At this point my frustration was hitting a peak. I tried again on the cell phone, and this time I found a good phone number for Acer in Canada, that was in my same time zone. This worked.
I reviewed my issue with the customer service tech support person. Unfortunately, I had never done a complete system backup, so the only option left was to reinstall Windows Vista. Fortunately, I had good current backups of all of my data.
The Acer laptop *never* came with Windows Vista discs. Now I learned why. To reinstall windows, when initially booting up, I had to: hit Alt & F10 at the same time, 3 times consecutively. This brought me to Windows Vista setup/install. Everything went fairly smoothly from there. Windows reinstalled ok.
Another thing I found interesting, and as it turned out, was very fortunate for me: When I bought this laptop, it was advertised as having a 100g hard drive. But as I got into it, I discovered it was showing in Windows Explorer as two separate 50g drives. I was guessing that the one drive was partitioned that way.
The drive/partition with Windows is the C drive, and labelled 'Acer', and I left it that way. The other drive/partition is the D drive, and I re-labelled it 'Data', and I kept all of my backups and important data there.
After Windows was reinstalled, the C drive was a fresh installation, all the old data was gone, But the D drive was left *untouched*. And all of my data was still sitting there, the same as before this whole thing started. So restoring my data went quickly.
I had to reinstall my software, and restore my data, but I was back to where I was before this fiasco started. What I did lose was my time, I would say a full day was lost, getting everything back to normal.
Best Regards, Barry
