I recently received an Acer Aspire 5100 laptop with a Hard Drive Failure post (fixed disk 0 failure). I immediately assumed the hard drive wasn't plugged in securely or it had failed. I proceeded to swap the drive out and test the old hard drive in another computer. It turns out, the hard drive was perfectly fine. The new drive gave the same disk failure post. That lead me to flash the BIOS so that the original settings would be restored. This didn't solve the problem either.
What makes this problem unique is that it gives you F1 to continue or F2 to tweak BIOS. Sometimes continuing (F1) will boot the computer up successfully whereas other times it will result in a black screen with blinking white cursor.
My diagnosis is that a recent small fall combined with two years of heat caused a solder joint to fail on the IDE controller. The best way to fix this would be to get a new motherboard, but that's expensive. The next best fix would be to get an external USB hard drive enclosure and boot from the external drive.
Would you consider this to be a reasonable diagnosis? Is using a hard drive in an external USB enclosure a viable alternative (noticeable performance drop?)? BIOS give me the option to boot from a USB hard drive, but does that include a hard drive in a USB hard drive enclosure?
Links:
http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/as5100.htm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817155704
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
~ sparkplug188