Now I have absolutely no idea what he did. He said he put the USB in to transfer some stuff over then it broke and he put in the "recovery disc" to fix it and now it seems like ever program that was on there has been deleted (Deus Ex, iTunes, Office 2010 trial and even the Windows side bar things). It gets to the desktop fine but after that nothing works.

I put the "recovery disc" in and tried to run it (because it says on the disc that it is used to restore it back to exactly how it was when it came from the factory) but the laptop just says something about not being able to find the E: drive so he seems to have broken that too.

I don't know jack crap about it or what to do so I was hoping someone here would be nice enough to try to help me.

I need a few extra details:

You say it boots into windows and then nothing works. What exactly doesn't work: Does internet explorer work? Does notepad work?
Does the windows key itself work? What does the start menu look like? Normal?
Do some programs found within the applications menu under the windows menu work, while others don't? If so, an example of what works and what doesn't?

Most important thing is to not panic. Secondly, we need to figure out just how broken down things are.

If things are well and truly broken, I can easily guide you through the steps which will usually solve that, but that can have nasty side effects, so I'm not getting into that just yet.

Also, I need the model and make of the laptop, a list of specifications as detailed as possible, and I may need you to test a couple of things on the system as it currently is.

Added: I gotta head to bed now, but I'll take a look at what you've written in the morning, see if I can write a step-by-step on what to do.

Erk, sometimes those Drives disappear, either hardware or OS related . There is a method I used, I had to change a value in the registry IIRC. If you Google it you might find what I did. i'm sorry I can't provide a link, but I printed the instructions before I tackled it.
Added: I did find how I got my E:Drive back, if it's not hardware related:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116

With the disc if he did the *factory thing then his drive got reformatted and all is lost. I believe they still give the "repair"option but if you don't press "R"when given the option, then you're totally fucked.

I have a HP all in one with that as an option. It does give you the opportunity to press "R" for repair and if you don't then everything installed gets wiped. The only thing left is the OS plus what ever else came as a bundle from the store/factory. AEmer is very knowledgible so hopefully he might have a solution.

I completely forgot to mention it's running Windows 7 64bit home premium.

He's out at the moment and I don't know his password but I'll try to get any info needed and check stuff when he gets back.

It's a Medion Akoya http://aldi.medion.com/md98770/au/?refPage=medion
Just for the record, I was against him buying this because well, it's a brand I'd never heard of and it's from Aldi >_> Please don't give me the whole "you should've bought a proper brand" thing, I told him that.


Edit: well he just got home and started it up. Came up with some weird screen with a panel in the middle with multiple options. From there I was able to boot Windows which I did. Noticed the "press f11 to restore" text come up so did that quickly and went through the options. It now says it's restoring itself back to "the exact settings and conditions as it arrived" or something like that.
Guess I'll see what happens in about 12 minutes.

Well, the factory restore seems to have worked perfectly. He says it's exactly how it was when he first started it, sidebar is back, cd drive works and all seems well.



Yeah, he was panicking and I didn't know what to do, stress and pressure

Anyway, I'm really sorry for wasting your time guys, and for my ignorance. Didn't even know there was a factory restore thing during startup, thought the disc was the only way.
Thanks a lot for being supportive though and yeah, sorry again.

There's no need to be sorry man, jeez, if you own a computer sooner or later something will go pear-shaped. I certainly don't know all the solutions, but I know how to swear loudly at the monitor pretty well.

We've all been there at some point, no problem

Yeah no need for apologies. Pcs are expensive and highly customized so any problem with them will have people be really scared. First reaction is almost always panic, even from hardened veteran users.

Its a good thing it worjed out without any more trouble

Mm yeah, issues like that are very rare for me, every time I fiddle with DX I end up re-installing it and that's about as bad as things get, guess I'm lucky.
Anyway, it's been going perfectly fine so now I just have to put DX on there for him.

It broke again This time he was on EB games' website, hit the back button and it came up with the "not responding" thing. Then he closed it with the red x button and tried to open iTunes. It then said that it was a dead shortcut or whatever (like how when you delete some but leave the shortcut) and then everything flicked to the white page icon and it went to this screen:

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/4523/agkvbau.jpg

Now when you reboot it comes up with the very first screen for a while and then goes to this, can't get to windows.

Now I'm just pissed off with it and am going to return it. Has to be a proper issue right?

Edit: they got the factory default restore thing going again while I was elsewhere but I'm still gunna return it.

you should. It sounds like something somewhere in the configuration has a bad driver, or is simply a bad part.

No two ways to say this: It needs to go back.

Yikes, I just had something similar. When cleaning my PC I musta dislodged a few pins going to the HDD, I couldn't get past the BIOS because it (HDD) didn't have power.

That picture basically means: "This is your PC speaking, we um ... can't find your harddisk ... it's probably your fault right? Insert a disk and we'll pretend it never happened."

So that's in a nutshell quite thoroughly fucked, and weird, because I wouldn't expect any application running in windows would be able to screw up your MBR.

Exactly. Somehow, whatever your brother did caused something in your hardware to enter a deadlocked state; destructive garbage information must've piled up in one of the motherboards devices that means a reset will fix it, but that kind of thing means there is some driver or hardware error, probably because the sum of parts in the laptop trigger code in a fashion some programmer didn't expect.

That you encounter it at all this quickly means the problem is likely to reoccur.

Which is why it needs to go back.

I'm pretty sure he didn't really do anything to it, all he installed was Firefox and iTunes
Anyway, he took it back a couple days ago, said it was faulty and they refunded him immediately, no questions asked I mean it's good he got the cash back but it was like they knew about the problem or expected as much to happen.

Anyway, now he's pestering me to look into new ones for him, but I just don't know enough.

He's looking at this at the moment.
http://www.harveynorman.com.au/asus-k53-laptop.html

What do you guys think? $1000 is the max he can spend on it and importing isn't an option. Any recommendations? It doesn't need to be great (and for that money I guess it can't be), it'll mostly be for school work and the internet so 1 grand is a bit overkill right?