Hard Drive can’t be found on Acer One Netbook

Hard Drive can’t be found on Acer One Netbook

My initial diagnosis on your problem is with your hard drive.   The fact that it says ‘boot device not found’  quickly points to a hard drive problem .  In addition to that the odd noise that you hear that sounds like a fan spinning  could be actually you hard drive disk continuously spinning while the system is trying to read information from your hard drive.    That answers your first question.

Failure to read information from the hard drive might be due to some bad sectors.  If critical information resides in a bad sector your hard drive will not be accessible at system boot.   Bad sectors can either be disc mechanical failure or simply normal wear and tear of disc surfaces.  There are however some spare locations in your hard drive where information on these bad sectors can be reallocated. Information on these bad sectors although not accessible during normal operation can still be recovered.

You may  try to fix the problem by running CHKDSK/R which will try to read information from bad sectors in your hard drive and re-allocate them to the available spare sectors.  You can use the windows  operating system disk  or the USB drive that you are using to gain access to the available repair options or the command prompt where you need to type CHKDSK/R  <hard drive letter>: .    The /R switch stands for repair.  CHKDSK will take several minutes to an hour to complete depending on the size of your hard drive.  Once it’s done, just restart your system.

If your restoration disc does not give any option for repair, there are available free software that you can download and burn to a disc so you can have a bootable disc and gain access to the command prompt.  But try this first: ask a friend or somebody who has a windows 7 based system to create a recovery disc for you which would basically contain recovery tools for windows.  Just go to control panel-> back up and restore->create system repair disc.

Since you also mentioned that you use your netbook for travel.  It may be due to contacts that have loosened up a little.   If your hard drive is a removable unit, you can also try to reseat it if there’s a way for you to do so.  Remove the hard drive and put it back in.  Do not attempt to this however if you are not certain about the procedure as it may do more harm than good.

Viruses can possibly destroy your hard drive but not to the extent of physical or mechanical damage.  They may however corrupt you system files that could crash down your system or corrupt the boot sectors which leads to operating system being unable to load.

If your unit still has an active warranty, it may also be a time to check for hard drive failure if there’s a built-in test available run it.  But if there’s none, contact your dealer or an authorized service center for possible hard drive replacement.  I would assume that you are ready to reformat your system which would result to lost of user data in your hard drive.  You also have the choice in case there are important files in your system that needs to be recovered to seek professional service for hard drive recovery.