Hey everyone, if someone could help me with this, I'd be grateful.

Acer Aspire 7741z
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
Intel® Pentium® Processor P6000 (3MB L3 cache, 1.86GHz, 1066MHz FSB)
Mobile Intel® HM55 Express
3GB RAM

Yesterday morning, I woke up, and my computer had this on the screen:



But it turned into:



If I turn off network boot, it only says



I've tried everything that forums have suggested, including setting BIOS to default, turning off network boot, taking the battery out and letting it completely restart, and changing the SATA controller.

Below I'll have some crappy paint remakes of my BIOS screens, sorry for the poor quality, and the Comic Sans, going from Photoshop with a Deathadder to Paint on Vista with a shitty Microsoft trackball isn't the easiest adjustment to make.







In the main tab, I have the options to enable disable the different boots; and SATA has the options AHSI and IDE, the Security tab is useless, only options to set passwords; and the Exit tab only lets me leave without changes, save with changes, or revert to default settings.

The farthest I got was popping in a recovery disk I had, it would get passed the Windows screen, and gave me options to get to recovery options, but every single option in every section was empty, there was nothing I could recover or fix.

I also tried making a disk out of recovery files I found online, using both a CD-R and DVD-R, but my computer would skip passed it and give me the messages above.

One thing I noticed was that my computer wasn't holding it's charge as long as it usually does; just a bit ago, my computer was able to stay unplugged for more than 2 hours, now it can't go 30 minutes unplugged since the issue appeared, unless it's as simple as only going in BIOS settings takes up exponential more energy? Also, I don't know if it's relevant but, heavy consuming programs, like 3DS Max, were crashing more often under stress than usual.

I don't remember downloading anything 2 days ago, before the issue happened, and when I went to bed, the computer was perfectly fine.

Is my hard drive fucked? Or is there a chance that maybe something got loose?

Thank you so much, any suggestions appreciated.

It's the power supply.

Can you hear the hd spinning/seeking or see the hd light flashing? It's sounds like a bad drive so far.. Just to be sure, check the drive's connection to the laptop. If that doesn't work, try putting the drive in the freezer, let it get nice and chilly, and try again. No, srsly. Freezing bad drives may temporarily bring them back to life. Just put it in a bag so you don't get shmeg on it. If THAT don't work, get a hd to usb adapter (be sure of your drive's interface) and try to read the drive on another machine. If you can't get the drive to respond, then sorry, you just determined you're fucked. But if you CAN read the drive, but you still can't boot your laptop, it sounds like hardware issues in the laptop itself, and again, you're pretty much fucked from what I can see without having it in front of me.

Them Western Digital drives, man. They suck. Gotta have Dirtbag get you a nice Seagate. Better yet, get a ssd.

You know what's odd? I'm having the same kind of issue...with that "PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE-ROM" message and it won't load windows at all. It keeps getting stuck and freezes up as soon as it starts booting up.

PXE is a network boot utility used by network administrators to put operating systems on systems without having to put the disc in each individual system. What's really happening is that your motherboard can't find an operating system installed so it's assuming you want to install one, but there's no bootable disc in the CD/DVD drive so it's attempting to find a PXE server on the network.

This means one of a few things:

1) Your BIOS settings got fucked and one of your SATA ports is disabled -- easy fix, re-enable it
2) Your boot mode (BIOS setting) got changed from BIOS to UEFI or the other way around -- see if there's a boot-from setting and change it back and forth between the two
3) Your SATA cable is fucked -- unlikely, but try new SATA cables on your drives -- esp your boot drive
4) Your filesystem is fucked -- relatively likely, it'll require a full reinstall
5) Your harddrive is fucked -- this could cause #4 and would require hardware replacement. There are diagnostics out there that you can use to test your drives. Look for anything that does a "SMART test" that is a bootable USB stick/CD ISO that you can download and run that shit.