Vista Fails to load, Regular/Safe/Recovery Mode all fail

[maXimus4444]

Hello everyone!

My friend just gave me her laptop to fix(does this happen to anyone else???). The laptop is an Acer Extensa 5620-6830 here are the specs

Intel Core 2 Duo T5250
1 GB DDR2
200 GB HDD
Windows Vista Home Premium

I power on the notebook and it goes through the POST, then begins to load Vista. After about 21/2 minutes it reboots and goes through the whole process over again.

The next time I booted the computer up it exclaimed, Windows failed to load - Choose to either 1.) Start in recovery mode or 2.) start windows normally. I select recovery mode and it gets past the windows loading screen; but then it just displays a black screen. Nothing ever happens.... reboot.

Then I try to boot to safe mode, thinking maybe there is a faulty driver causing the crash. It seems to load all the windows files, but then *BAM* BSOD.... system reboots. I'm not sure how to get to the minidumps if i can't even power up the computer.

Further, any mode from the F8 list crashes the same way.

And now for the worst part, she told me she purchased the machine at a retail giant, whose name I won't mention. She claims that there was never any disks that came with the laptop. No Windows Vista startup cd :/

I'm not sure what to do now.... any ideas?

thanks
maX

 

[maXimus4444]

I was able to disable the automatic restart on system crash. (I didn't see it in the options after I pressed F8)

The BSOD error reads: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

***EDIT***

I did some research on the error. It appears I need to run the chkdsk utility. Is it possible, b / c I can't get into windows, to create a boot disk which will run chkdsk? or is that a dumb question?

 

[maXimus4444]

Any ideas?