Diagnosing your PC loop

First off sorry if this is the wrong place.

So I have an older laptop Aspire E 15 Start ES1-512-C96S. A couple weeks ago it locked up on me and I was forced to shut it down by holding the power button. After I fired it back up it told me it needed to diagnose the c drive. It ran that and then booted the rest of the way up. It was then running super slow so I opened the windows tab and told it to restart. After that it began needing to “diagnose your pc” and initially it would complete and say there was an error and ask me to reset. I tried to do the reset without losing my files as some stuff is irreplaceable. It wouldn’t work citing encountering an issue so I finally gave up. Tonight I pulled out the laptop again thinking I’d give it another go and it is stuck seemingly infinitely trying to diagnose the pc. I’m not sure what else to include now to help with sorting out the issue but will try to keep checking back as necessary to answer any follow up.

Accepted answers

All comments

efleming87

Update: I sat here so long with it running the diagnostic that it finally completed and gave me the screen to choose to reset again. After picking reset and save files I got a blue screen that eventually started a process and failed. I now have a blue screen that says “reset this pc” in big letters and below it says “There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.”

IronFly

windows 8 or 10?

it can be your HDD going bad.

RanY2J

Also, you can try doing an SFC scan and see if it helps man.

Open elevated command prompt and type sfc /scannow and that will probably scan for any corrupted files within your Windows. Also, if your Windows is recommending a reset, go ahead and do that. It's okay to reset but at the cost of losing your data man.

efleming87

IronFly I used the free windows 10 upgrade for it.

RanY2J I honestly don’t know how to get that going without it letting me see the desktop.

IronFly

first of all, let's check if you are able to recovery your files entering safe mode:

at boot press ALT+F10 keys, this will start Acer/windows recovery.

From the Recovery screen

Click on Troubleshoot.

Click on Advanced Options.

Click on Startup Settings.

Click on Restart.

The PC will now reboot to the Startup Settings screen.

Press 4 to Enable Safe Mode as prompted.

once in Safe mode, you will able to backup your personal data

efleming87

@IronFly there isn’t a start up settings option. I have system restore, system image recovery, startup repair, command prompt, and UEFI firmware settings. Steps up to that point worked exactly as you said.

Would the startup repair be the same?