Notebooks & Netbooks

[Bestrafung]

I'm a PC repair technician and have been working on computers for almost 20 years and this has me completely confused. My Aspire V3-571-6643 laptop was working fine until just recently. The system will power on and show the Acer screen and then immediately reboots. It will stay in this reboot loop until manually stopped.

I cleaned and reseated the RAM module and also tried it in both slots with no change. I was able to access BIOS and determined the drives and all settings are correct and even reset to factory defaults with no change. I then pulled the HDD to use in a docking station to determine if the drive was salvagable. Everything reads fine and passed both short and long tests via SeaTools. With the HDD installed the system won't try to boot to CD/USB but after removing it the system will boot to CD just fine. I then ran a full scan using Eurosoft Pc-Check and everything is fine. I reinstalled the HDD and immediately get the reboot loop again.

At this point the mainboard and HDD both test fine independently but will not work together. My only guess is that the mainboard is no longer supplying enough power for all of the components and crashing when the HDD tries to spin up on boot. That, or the SATA controller is malfunctioning and only working for the ODD. Has anyone else experienced this issue or have any ideas how to resolve it? My best guess is the mainboard needs replaced but I'm not sure as I've never seen this before.

[IronFly]

This happen with and without AC adapter connected?

[Bestrafung]

Yes, this happens on battery or AC. Even though I've only ever seen residual charge issues with Dells I also tried discharging any residual charge in capacitors by removing both the CMOS and regular battery and pressing power.

The system will boot from CD to a Live Linux or diagnostics without issue. The only time the reboot issue presents itself is when the HDD is connected. I don't have an adapter to try the HDD in the ODD bay or I would. I'm open to any ideas at this point. I've pretty much already accepted that it's a mainboard issue either way.

[IronFly · Accepted solution]

I would check with another HDD if possible, i agree that probably is more MB related but...worth a try.

[Bestrafung]

I tried the HDD from another system and it appears to be working properly. It BSODS, but that's probably because the proper drivers were missing. Unfortunately it's a client's drive so I can't format it for a proper test and don't have a spare at the moment. For anyone else who has this issue, the original HDD tested fine on all SMART tests and all of the data is accessible but it still appears to have a serious boot/POST issue. Also, there are no SMART errors. I honestly have no idea why the HDD won't pass POST but it'll probably be just fine as an external. Thanks for the assistance.