Aspire 5552 BSOD. Bios update fixed for 2 weeks; Laptop Black screening during launch now.

Collective

As the description stipulates.  Wife's aspire 5552 Black screened a few times then stopped booting up.  Checked out everything and it seemed ok.  Recovered the important data (pics, music, documents etc.) with a HD bridge to another Acer and let it sit.  5-6 months later I read up and try a Bios update.  Eureka!  It lives again!  It's worked great for the last 2 weeks as long as the flashdrive containing the updated Bios was inserted.  Then it started BSODing again without warning.  At current, I am unable to get it to finish the boot up process.  Occasionally it will get far enough to try and repair, but the screen turns off and it doesn't come back on. 

 

Completely at a loss here, bought two Acer's within months of each other, and both are now down to what seems to be different problems.  Both are in good shape, they just randomly started acting up. 

 

Please help.

 

 

Collective

An update:  I was able (without the USB flash drive) to load up windows for a few moments.  It has the latest Bios installed.  I was in the process of checking my program files (hadn't modified anything) when it black screened and locked. 

 

Any thoughts on this and the previous?

IronFly

it's hard to diagnose issues like those, normally the first 2 suspects can be faulty ram stick or HDD.

 

you can check both using a bootable media like Hiren's boot cd and check ram with memtest or HDD with one of available tools:

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

 

unzip and burn the iso file to a CD or USB flash drive, then boot from it.

 

another good test is to try Ubuntu from LiveCD and check if it works, the LiveCD will not install on HDD but it works only from ram, so can be a good test to ram too.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

 

this kind of issues can be BIOS chip issues or motherboard going bad on some components.

how old is this laptop?

Collective

I tried the Hiren's boot; no success.  My fear at current is that the Hard drive has finally had it with the BSOD's. 

 

The laptop is about 4 years old.  Is it possible for the Bios to flash and erase shortly there after? 

 

I appreciate the help. 

IronFly

BIOS chip can have issue if it's going bad itself but i think you will have other kind of issues, normally issues can arise from the CMOS battery.

i would open the ram/HDD bay and check the voltage of the CMOS battery, if it's under 1.3V i would change it.

you can try also a CMOS reset taking off that battery, short 2 pins near ram slots and check if it still BSOD.

(google around about CMOS reset pins position)

 

by the way your issue it's similar to a lot of other laptop from various brand with AMD CPU/chipset, sometimes a BIOS recovery flash fixed, sometimes not.....