Acer Aspire V3-571G Stuck in Safe Mode

chrreilly

I recently bought an Acer Aspire running Windows 8 and have had no complaints up until now. I tried booting into safe mode by holding shift while pressing restart and after passing the Acer startup logo, the system hangs at a black screen. I waited about 5 minutes at the black screen and decided to restart the computer manually. The laptop successfully booted in normal mode.

 

I then decided to try another way of accessing safe mode by editing the boot settings in msconfig. I set it to boot in normal safe mode (no networking/command prompt) and restarted the computer. The same problem occured on the restart (passes Acer logo and then hangs at black screen). However, since the computer is set to automatically boot in safe mode, every time I restart the I run into the same problem. Since I cannot edit msconfig, I cannot boot Windows normally.

 

I have tried restoring to an earlier point, but I'm still having the same problem. Anyone know how to fix this? I do not want to damage my new computer with these continued hard resets when it is stuck at the black screen.

chrreilly

Just an update for anyone else having this problem: I fixed it by running the Windows 8 refresh utility (shift+f8 during boot->troubleshoot). It deleted all the 3rd-party apps I had installed, but it is better than a full restore because I was able to keep my data.