The Death of Two Acer Aspire One’s

Yesterday I was working away on my netbook, an Acer Aspire One when suddenly I heard the hard drive spin up to a volume I've not heard it at before, then as quickly as it happened, it spun down and then ‘clunked’.  The screen went blank and there was nothing happening at all.

I tried rebooting, but knew it would get nowhere, and it didn’t.

I decided to remove the hard drive and place it in an external USB caddy, so I set about taking the netbook apart, only 10 minute job, and placed the drive in the caddy as planned, but to no avail, the hard drive was dead.

I have had a LaCie Little Disk 320GB USB drive for a while, and decided that since the drive inside was a SATA model, as is in the Aspire One, I would replace the faulty one with that.

Extracting the disk from the caddy was pretty easy, despite several references online to it being very difficult, so I will post a guide on how to do that later on today (hopefully).

I replaced the faulty drive the the LaCie's disk and reinstalled Windows 7 and am pleased to say that I am writing this article on the Aspire One now.

However, a few hours later my fiancé, who also owns an Aspire One went to use hers, but it would not boot.

The power light comes on, the fan kicks in, but that is it.  I do not want to take her one apart to see if I can fix it, since hers (unlike mine) still carries it’s warranty – I voided the warranty on mine within a few hours of receiving it since I upgraded the RAM from the built-in 512MB to 1.5GB.

So Bethany’s AAO will have to be returned to Acer for repair.

However, on the plus side, I am happy to say that my own AAO is running nicely, and the additional 200GB of hard drive capacity will come in handy for sure!

Have you found this article useful?  Have you run in to similar problems with your Aspire One?  Do you have something else to share?  Please leave your comments below, and don’t forget to share this article on your favourite social networks – use the buttons below!