[amandamon]

Can anyone help - PC world want to charge me £180 to fix it - that is back up data onto an external hard drive which I would have to buy, then they say I need to buy system recovery disks from Acer - and then I lost the plot!
If they can get to back up the data -how is it they cannot system restore to a month ago?
the lap top will switch on then goes into the sytem start up - then it picks up the probelm,goes through 100% of the fix then starts all overagain.It ios running vista 18 months old. the last time it worked was when someone was on Facebook.
Any ideas?
A

[etaf]

try an boot into safe mode - as it boots tap F8 you should get a menu
see if you can get into safe mode

Backing up the data,
on a good PC with a CD writer and CD
download UBUNTU www.ubuntu.com
now download the ISO
right click on the ISO and burn to CD - to make a bootable CD
put that CD into the faulty machine - see if it will boot up the CD
(you may need to get into the bios of the PC , using F2 or Del key to get into setup bios - which key to use should come on the screen as you boot , you then need to change the boot order to boot CD first )

Now on booting the UBUNTU cd you should get a menu which says run from CD DO NOT install
if that runs - you should be able to see your windows harddrive - and with a USB harddrive installed - copy any data over