For approximately 1-in-10 boot-ups, my Acer Aspire will fail to boot completely. Rather than booting up to the Win-7 operating system, I sometimes get a Windows Boot Manager window with the following message:
Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer. The error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external USB drive while the device is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer.
If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.
Status: 0xc00000e9
Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred.
So, there is no external USB drive or internal CD-ROM drive to cause the problem. More significantly, I returned the laptop to Acer Service about six months ago for this same issue and to have the hard drive replaced. Out of the box from Service, though, it came up with the same error message as described. How frustrating! I verified that the hard drive was replaced by checking the serial number of the new drive against the serial number of the drive the laptop was sent back with, and they were different.
Up to this point I've been able to work around the issue by pressing the Enter or Escape key from the Windows Boot Manager window, which reboots the laptop. Usually, it boots properly from that point, but sometimes it gives the reported error message. If not, then I redo the Enter or Escape key sequence until it does boot properly. So far, it hasn't taken more than two times of this key sequence to get it to boot.
Can anyone help? This unreliable boot-up has me wondering if I eventually won't be able to do the work around. Also, this laptop has always done this since brand-new. I kick myself for not trying it out in the 30-day vendor return period. The installed BIOS version, 1.09, is the latest and greatest according the the Acer Downloads site.
