Black Screen with White Flashing Underscore upon booting.

Hey, thanks for the super quick reply. Regarding the december 2009 BIOS upgrade, I did not know of this and did not do this, is this were the problem may have came from?

I don't understand why it will not boot now yet when we first upgraded it, we loaded up absolutely fine.

Also sorry about my technical expertise, it only covers so much, as i have not upgraded the BIOS, is there anyway i could possibly recover the system or do a clean install?

Thanks.

James.

Hi, sorry about double posting ( I don't know if that is a rule on this site). Under F2 (not F12 as i incorrectly stated earlier) I accessed what i believe to be the BIOS (turquoise coloured menu?)and under boot option, changed this from first looking to boot from the HDD and instead moved the dvd drive up to number on the list (I had mistakenly thought another thing on the last was the dvd drive).

This gave me some response, now instead of the black screen with the white flashing underscore, it now has 'Please press any button to load from the disc' or words to that effect and i have done so and I am now faced with an installation screen for windows 7 asking for the language etc, so I am thinking is this wanting me to do a fresh/clean install and if so, do i continue?

Thanks and sorry to be a bother.

Whenever you do such an upgrade you hit the maker's site to see what support files are there that are new. The BIOS popped out since it was so fresh. There are other drivers too.

I'd go back to the old OS and get all the BIOS and drivers from Acer next time out.

As you can guess, I'm not there but I can share we've been here before where it works and fails later.

Recovery or clean install? Why not boot the 7 DVD and try?
Bob

Hi Bob, sorry to keep posting what seems to be the same post over again. I have chosen the language etc to be UK and now it offers me the option to either repair, this being in the bottom left corner or the standard clean/upgrade options as if i were installing win7 for the first time.

My big worry is my friend would very much like to keep all his docs as it has his uni work on it (we only backed up some things as we thought the upgrade would work perfect, as it did so on my laptop) and therefore i feel if i do an 'upgrade' installation on a system that has already been 'upgraded' to windows 7, will this cause more damage to the system?

I have a windows vista disc as well, would you recommend me just leaving windows 7 and installing this?

One more thing, would it be advisable to somehow get back onto the computer either through repair or upgrade and to make a backup of these docs he needs and then to install windows vista?

Thanks for your help so far as well!

Backup first.

The idea of changing the OS with files we can't lose on the hard drive should now be a bit obvious. I apologize for not finding a less blunt way to writing this.

Let's find a way to get the files out?

-> Boot up UBUNTU (see google on how to run it from CD) and put some USB hard drive on it and copy the files out. Now that the files are safe, we can try the 7 DVD again. The clean install is the best way since leftovers can spoil this party.

And given we have google docs, why don't folk use that for documents we can't lose?
Bob

Thank you Bob for reminding me of Ubuntu, I had forgotten about that and the livr CD function, I have a copy of Ubuntu 9.10 and I ran that and I have now managed to get his whole user off the laptop and onto my external HDD, now i will continue with a clean install on win7. Fingers crossed!

I have attempted to make a clean install of win7 but for the installation process, the machine needs to restart several times. When it does this it reverts back to the original problem that it wont load and shows the 'Acer' screen followed by 'press any key to continue' and when I do this, it brings me back to the original 'Install Windows' menu.

I didn't check the notes at acer, but the probability is high.

Also, change the boot order to HDD first and see if that cures the blinky cursor symptom. I have this hp d499t that does that if the boot order is CD first. Go figure when they'll fix that but easy enough to change when I need to use the boot CDs.
Bob