Hi, I'm a newby here to ask for some advice / guidence. A client has asked me to look at their laptop which has been having reliability issue. They described the problem to me as - 'Loss of touchpad functionallity when using a insurance quote program' (they only use the laptop to run this software as it is not compatible with her main Mac System. It became apparent that the system was in fact freezing - with no mouse / keyboard (ie ctrl / alt / del to access Task Manager) functionality whatsoever - to only option being to perform a hard shut down and reboot. I'm not sure how long she has being doing this, the laptop would reboot, work for a while but then randomly freeze. This morning I had a call from her telling me that all she was getting was a black screen (ie the system wasn't booting). I now have the laptop in front of me. I switched on and pressed F10 to bring up advance boot options, and tried to boot to Last Known Good Configuration, but the system just froze at a black screen. Now when restarting I can't even access the advanced startup menu - nothing at all, screen is completely blank, but the HDD can be heard spinning. With the client not being particularly technically minded - the only thing I know for deffinate is that it's an Acer Aspire 5739G, running a version of Windows 7. I will have to remove the HHD to try and recover customer data from the 'Insurance Quoting Program', but would appreciate some advice on the best way to proceed and attempt to resolve the main issue as I obviously can't access the recovery partition, or indeed the BIOS to change the boot sequence to use any other recovery media.

Hi, It sounds like a virus have basically killed the hard drive, what I would say is image the current drive, take off any client data and scan it with an anti-virus scanner and just re-format the laptop, or re-image it if you have an image of it before it became corupted. Hope it helps, but I really dont see another way around it really.Lewis.j.Routledge

I wouldn't say a virus killed it because no data points to that BUT I do agree something has either went currpt with the HDD or the OS. More and likely the Laptop has some diagnostic utilities you can use to see if the HDD is good or not. But if it does not then get the customer data off and start from scratch with a fresh rebuild on the HDD. See what happens. If the install goes fine then my guess is the OS was bad. If not the HDD is bad. Good luck.