Acer 5672 keeps rebooting (hardware issue)

[bluezz]

My Acer laptop keeps restarting on me in very quick succession.

Here is how it all started. I forgot to shut down my laptop, closed the laptop cover, put it in my neoprene bag and forgot about it. About 2 hours later came home and saw the power light was still on (which I thought was odd). I plugged in the power cable and started off the computer. It ran fine for about 15 minutes but then it restarted. Then it ran for about 8 minutes and restarted abruptly again .

That point onwards, I have not been able to boot into windows. I know its a hardware issue since EVEN BEFORE I can select that I want to boot into safe mode, it restarts. Sometimes it restarts even before letting me go into BIOS.

This is what is confusing me soo much. I thought something is wrong with hardware but once in BIOS, the laptop runs fine !! Keeps running normally in BIOS as long as I want it to run.

My guess is that the hardware memory is somehow corrupt. Maybe a heat issue (but BIOS runs ok for as long as I want).

I really hope its fixable because my thanksgiving shopping has made me bankrupt. Not to mention that the laptop is not in warranty anymore

I'd be REAALLYYY thankful for any help/suggestion.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

If the laptop boots but will not run windows then it is a software issue. It may not be associated with being left on while in the bag - I do that to mine all the time and maybe for a whole weekend.
If you have backed up your data I would try using the restiore CDs that came with it.

 

[Tedster]

boot off your XP CD and run CHKDSK on your C: drive.

 

[bluezz]

Latest Update:

1) I took my hard-disk out, backed-up all the data

2) Formatted the hard-disk (using KillDisk)

3) Used Windows Vista to create NTFS partition (format again)

4) Tried installing windows Vista

5) System rebooted during installation.. but I made sure it installed vista successfully

6) EVEN after installing Vista it's giving me the same problem.. keeps rebooting after a while

7) Ran CheckDisk on the hard-disk

8) Used SpinRite (booted from SpinRite disk) to find some surface problems (system reboots during SpinRite operation)



I am totally clueless what the problem is. I was betting my money on the hard-disk bad sector.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

Sorry - maybe I was wrong about the software issue. If you ran chkdsk, what was the result? If you have an increasing bad sector count then the drive is dying and not worth bothering with.

 

[you use a 286]

I would say this is a RAM or video card problem