Unbootable Acer 6930 - Vista Home Premium

Here's the deal. I've been working on this laptop for a client for 3 days now, and I swear I've read every forum out there, so I apologize in advance for any headaches I may cause here.

As the title says, it's an Acer 6930 with Vista Home Premium. When I boot to normal mode, it gets to the 'Welcome' screen, and the little spinning circle just sits and spins. The client said they actually let it sit like that for 2 days and it still did nothing.

Boot to safe mode - BSOD, generally with 'Page Fault in Non Paged Area', but sometimes others as well. (Sorry I did not jot any of them down).

Boot to BartPE thumb drive - 'remove media and press any key to restart'

Boot into 'repair your computer' - Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically. "Windows cannot repair this computer automatically.
If you have recently attached a device to this computer, such as a camera or portable music player, remove it and restart your computer. If you continue to see this message, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

Hardware tests pass - memory and hard drive both come up clean.

Client doesn't have the Vista install disk, so I tried to D/L one last night, and apparently I got a bad image, because even in my other machine, the dvd is showing empty, so I am SOL on a Vista disk until I try to D/L another.

I've checked out several forums as I said, and followed a lot of their instructions to no avail. I have also had the drive out and hooked to another machine, and ran Malwarebytes on it. The scan literally took 13 hours and found nothing wrong. I have also ran chkdsk and it fixed some bad sectors, but that's about it. SFC /scannow from the recovery area/cmd prompt says there is a repair pending and that a reboot is required, and you can reboot all day long and it will always tell you that.

So, grab some aspirin after reading all that, get a coffee, smoke 'em if ya got 'em, and then let me know if you have any suggestions short of a 12 gauge at 20 yards.

- HJ

Ground yourself, open the computer, and check all the wired connectors in the computer. Check the wires themselves, making sure there's no stripped insulation on them, anything that would cause a current to jump. Make sure the fans are running.

Run another round of memory and hard drive tests from a different tester. It sounds like some sort of motherboard problem.

Did the client, like, spill a cup of coffee on the rig? Sometimes they do stuff like that and they're ashamed to tell you.

Since it's a laptop, it's a bit more difficult to check all the wiring. And as far as I can tell, there has been no spills, but like you said, never can be 100% sure of that.

The really strange thing is that if it was a current issue or a heat issue, it should BSOD all the time, or at least once in a while in normal mode, but this one only does it when booting to safe mode. When booting normally, it gets to the welcome screen and just sits and spins, never even prompting for a login.

-HJ

Try this
When it gets to welcome screen, press the WINDOWS KEY.

Some times works, some times not.

Theog....in this case we'll have to go with 'sometimes not'. No affect when pressing the Windows key.

-HJ