I have an Acer Aspire 5742 laptop and for the last month or so it has been randomly freezing on startup every few days. As of this last few days to a week it won't boot and gives me this error message:
"disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"
So, I am thinking the hard drive is bad or going bad. So, I changed the boot order so the disc drive had 1st boot priority. I tried a Hiren's Boot CD and tried and Windows 7 disc to test and try to repair hoping it may be a bad boot sector. Upon boot it gives me the message again. I don't think it even tries to boot the disc.
I then took the hard drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another laptop running XP. I checked Disk Management and the hard drive doesn't show up/register.
I don't know of anything else I can really do if it isn't recognized. I guess I'm looking for any additional advice on what to try so I can salvage my data. Any help is appreciated!
"disk read error occurred; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"
So, I am thinking the hard drive is bad or going bad. So, I changed the boot order so the disc drive had 1st boot priority. I tried a Hiren's Boot CD and tried and Windows 7 disc to test and try to repair hoping it may be a bad boot sector. Upon boot it gives me the message again. I don't think it even tries to boot the disc.
I then took the hard drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another laptop running XP. I checked Disk Management and the hard drive doesn't show up/register.
I don't know of anything else I can really do if it isn't recognized. I guess I'm looking for any additional advice on what to try so I can salvage my data. Any help is appreciated!