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minuteman263 0 Newbie Poster

One of our Acer machines at work somehow lost it's mind overnight. This morning somehow when it was booted, the recovery software came to life and it started doing a recovery from the hidden partition. It loaded the files ok, but when it came to the update section it didn't get very far and hung with a box that said Windows not loaded. reboot to begin setup (or something similar). It will just repeat this over and over. I took the drive out and looked inside with a usb adaptor and the origional files are still there and not overwritten. I used a windows disk to repair the boot. Still no go. Is there any way to reverse, or to get it unstuck. I tried a lot of things and nothing seemed to work.

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Dani AI

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— concise, practical plan below that avoids guessing and focuses on safe recovery.

First, stop any further attempts that rewrite partitions. The fact that you can read the drive from a USB adapter means the user data and the factory image are likely still present. Make a full sector image of the drive (Macrium Reflect/Clonezilla or a dd image) before trying fixes that change the partition table or BCD. If you only need files, copy the entire Users folder and any application data now.

Next, use a Windows 7 DVD/USB Repair Environment and run non-destructive checks and boot repairs from Command Prompt. Confirm the correct drive letter for the Windows partition (it can change in WinRE), then run:

chkdsk C: /f /r
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\Windows

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

If /rebuildbcd finds nothing, back up and recreate the BCD:

attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bcdboot c:\Windows /s c:

Use diskpart to confirm the system/boot partition is marked active before recreating boot files.

If those steps don’t escape the setup loop, collect the setup logs for diagnosis: copy C:\Windows\Panther\setupact.log and setuperr.log (and any Sysprep/Panther logs) to USB — they show the failing setup stage. If the OEM recovery partition is intact and you want to reuse it, try the Acer recovery hotkey (usually Alt+F10) from a cold boot or create official recovery media from Acer. As a last resort, restore your image or perform a clean install so data is safe.

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