My sister has an Acer Aspire netbook with Win7 x64. She just started getting an error message on boot that a boot device cannot be found. The hard drive is the 1st on the boot device list in the BIOS.
My initial reaction is that it could be a loose HD cable, a defective HD, or that Windows is corrupt. Is there an easy way to try to repair Windows if she can't boot into it before checking the hardware? TIA
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. She ended up taking it to a technician, who booted with a Win7 disk and still couldn't get the drive to be recognized. He said that data recovery would cost a bundle, so she opted to just replace the hard drive.
I told her to give it to me and I would see what I could do. I plugged it in to a HD enclosure; the drivers loaded, and Device Manager shows it with the correct name. However, it does not show up in My Computer. I checked Disk Management, and it shows the disk, but doesn't show any partitions, rather all the space is unallocated. When I try to initialized it, for both MBR and GPT, it gives an error: "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)", which sounds like a checksum error. Does this mean the MBR is corrupt? is there any way to create a partition without erasing the data in order to attempt data recovery? TIA