Laptop Problems

[Dagenadriel]

My Laptop had been kind of screwy the last couple of days, but today was worse.
So today, I went to start up my laptop and it greeted me with this screen:

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4121/p3141044.jpg

then it did some deleting of something:

http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/2604/p3141046.jpg

then, after about a five minute wait at the "welcome" screen, all I got was the desktop background:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/1771/p3141047.jpg

I finally figured out that I could open task manager:

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/1492/p3141048.jpg

I then used it to open Windows explorer and Firefox. I then got a bunch of messages telling me about various errors, and here I am.

Everything is working now, but is there a way to prevent this from happening in the future?

[Commander Thor]

Do you have your Windows XP installation disk? You're gonna need it.
Insert the XP Setup disk into your disk drive & restart your computer. When prompted, press "Any Key" to continue & bring up the XP setup utility. Once it's all been loaded, press the 'R' key to do a system recovery. Just simply follow the on-screen prompts.

[Viral Death]

Sounds like a virus or a worm that is going around and it is screwing up your hard-drive! I have had this happen to my desktop computer that got fryed. I would talk to someone that knows alot about computers and get you reprogramming disk for your laptop and reprogram it!

[balp94]

from the looks of your last pic u have windows xp...i dont no bout that bc i have 4 computer...but they r all new and operating on vista..but a couple of our laptops do that and it is just checkin the system for any potential errors and ways to fix them...but this isnt the case if it has ever done it at a time other than on start up:yeah:

[Kiros]

Sounds like a virus or a worm that is going around and it is screwing up your hard-drive! I have had this happen to my desktop computer that got fryed. I would talk to someone that knows alot about computers and get you reprogramming disk for your laptop and reprogram it!

Not necessarily. This sounds like a legitimate disk-fault to me. If you have had your laptop (or at least the hard disk) for over a few years, it's definitely possible that the disk has finally died. My first hard drive died after about 7 years. I know that some hard drives die earlier and some die later.

However, there is a chance that this was just an uncommon incident. If a computer fails while moving files or writing to the disk, the disk's data may become corrupt over various sectors.

Regardless of why your disk has errors, CHKDSK is a Windows utility that is meant to correct these issues. If it finds a problem, it has to delete the corrupt data and then try to fix it if it can. Typically, this won't cause a system failure, but if several important indexes or files are corrupt, it will eat them. As such, the system may not be able to function correctly afterward.

If you bought the laptop from a company (not a person), it should have come with some kind of recovery or installation disc. If you haven't installed another copy of Windows over the manufacturer's version, then you can recover the system by using this disc (or set of discs). Place the only (or first) disc in the laptop's disc drive and restart the system. While it's booting, you should see something like, "Boot CD: Press any key to boot from the CD ..." Watch out for this, because it normally only stays on the screen for about 4 or 5 seconds. Boot from the disc. After the software loads, follow the on-screen instructions for a recovery procedure.

Important: If you choose to do a fresh install instead of a recovery, it will ask you if you want to format the partition. If you format the partition, you will lose all data that was stored on it.

Let us know if you need any further help.

[Dagenadriel]

[/QUOTE] If you bought the laptop from a company (not a person), it should have come with some kind of recovery or installation disc. If you haven't installed another copy of Windows over the manufacturer's version, then you can recover the system by using this disc (or set of discs). Place the only (or first) disc in the laptop's disc drive and restart the system. While it's booting, you should see something like, "Boot CD: Press any key to boot from the CD ..." Watch out for this, because it normally only stays on the screen for about 4 or 5 seconds. Boot from the disc. After the software loads, follow the on-screen instructions for a recovery procedure.

Important: If you choose to do a fresh install instead of a recovery, it will ask you if you want to format the partition. If you format the partition, you will lose all data that was stored on it.

Let us know if you need any further help.[/QUOTE]

I'm now getting errors constantly and more and more things have stopped working. So I want to use the recovery disk.

I have the recovery disk and its an almost brand new laptop (2 months old), I have a few questions about the recovery disk though. Does using this erase my current data? Do I insert it when the computer is off or already on (When windows has loaded) If it does delete the data, does it erase it on all hard drives? (My Laptop came with 2 70GB internal Hard Drives, I store data on both)

Lastly, I have 2 discs that came with the laptop one labeled "System CD" and one labeled "Recovery DVD" whats the difference?

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/9528/picture0082.jpg
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2397/picture0083.jpg
and I found a third disk called "Disk Formatter Application CD"
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/6602/picture0084.jpg

[Skhorpion]

You could have a bad harddrive. Get ontrack disk manager or some other bootable hdd testing utility and run it. Be careful not to do a sequential R/W as this will erase the drive.

[Dagenadriel]

Should be all good now, my computer genius brother is running 20 different virus scan programs on it, and he says that he thinks it pretty much fixed.

[Halibut]

well mine does that sometimes..i just restart it and do a systam scan for viruses and delete any that i have ..or your hard drive could be cracking up

[wavey]

well if he fails, i would repair the system via inserting the recovery disk before boot up and setting BIOS settings to boot from a CD before HDD
once booted you will be greeted with a big acer recovery thingy. look for options to 'repair' the system certain indexes have been damaged.