So I'm having that boot loop issue....(Aspire VN7-792G)

Mr_Morningstar

Hola All,

To date, I really haven't had too many serious issues with the unit, short of the normal SSD and optical drive replacement, but I've run into an issue I'm curious if anyone else has dealt with that has befuddled me a bit.

Battery was going, roughly 30% degradation, so called myself fixing it and buying a replacement. I didn't want to open it up just to replace this battery, so I also grabbed the new Intel Ax200 wifi 6 ready m.2 card to install as well. Swap in both, reset the battery, power it on, and get a critical low battery message. Ok, no worries, didn't plug it in, pop the charger in, and get greeted with the normal boot screen, except no spinning white dots. Something is absolutely wrong.
So I start by retracing my steps, and the easiest way, undo the changes. No change. Now it's a big problem. Attempt to boot into safe mode, but forgot Microsoft thought it wise to disable F8 unless you specifically reactivate it in command prompt. I'm prepared, I have recovery media and a Win 10 install disc. I successfully get F2 to get me in to change the boot order, and even though the drive is listed, it will not run. I try the recovery media, and it stares at me blankly O_o

I switch to legacy, and successfully get the CD to load, but not without issues

The drive shows in UEFI but not in legacy BIOS, which makes sense, as it's an M.2 NVME. Naturally, when I attempt to repair the startup, do a system restore, even a full reset, I have no success as it doesn't see a windows installation.

I even tried Hiren's boot cd, and received the first message about ram disk space. I'm not sure how to proceed at this point. My normal troubleshooting tactics have fully failed, and have gotten me no further than I was when I started. I honestly believe I'm overlooking something fairly simple, but I'm not sure what, and frustration is setting in.

Any thoughts here? And before the question is asked, yes, of course I tried Alt-F10. No response.

Have at it folks.

Mr_Morningstar

First, thanks for the overwhelming response and support to this thread; it's truly appreciated. Clearly with the staggering amount of responses and suggestions I received, I had no idea where to start, so I ended up just fixing it myself.

Sarcasm intended.

But on a serious note, for those that are still experiencing this problem, I did figure it out, but obviously no 2 situations are the exact same. My solution below.

Just to recap how I got here, I installed a new battery, and also a new Intel AX200 wifi 6 card. I didn't condition the battery or download the drivers for the card first though, so we ended up with only the Acer loading screen, and no progress. Either or could've caused the condition.

It's debatable what actually happened here, but in any event I somehow damaged the bootloader, which traditional recovery software (recovery discs, Hiren's CD, boot repair disk, etc) can usually make short work of fixing. One very important detail I left out is that I have a 960 Pro NVME SSD for my OS, and that pretty much is why nothing I tried worked.

As it's an NVME drive, this storage solution favors GPT over the MBR partitioning system, meaning that it will only work via UEFI, NOT legacy BIOS. In UEFI mode, all I received was an Acer logo, and an infinite boot loop. No changes to the boot order, no USBs, no CDs, NOTHING worked or could be accessed. Just a black screen with a logo. Sucks. When I switched to legacy BIOS and attempted to get into the recovery environment with ALT-F10, restarting 3 times, changing the boot order via F2, everything failed, 100% because of the NVME drive not being seen and thus neither the OS = no repair is done.

Common sense kicked in, and I realized all the disks the PC came with originally where configured in MBR, so my recovery disk are designed for legacy; this means we have to recover in BIOS. I created a live boot repair disk USB, booted in legacy, copied my NVME and 850 SSD and went to reinstall windows.

At the "install now" screen, I received an error about attempting install on a GPT disk, so as most people know hopefully, command prompt is available via Shift+F10. I went into diskpart, selected the 850 SSD, cleaned, converted to MBR, and successfully reinstalled windows 10 fresh. Many many updates later (literally HOURS), I got to a stable point where everything worked as expected, but I'm still running the 850, which is MBR, and still need to transfer back to the primary 960, which is GPT, so now a conversion has to happen.

Thankfully someone at Microsoft decided it was stupid to have to wipe your drive to convert, and that paying $50 bucks to AOMEI or something is bad business practices, so windows now has a tool called MBR2GPT which......converts from MBR to GPT. Tada.

So, I went thru the process of validating the disk could be converted, and then did that. The crazy thing is that though it clearly states this is designed to be used outside the OS, this was done, with the computer on, using the exact disk I'm converting, currently in MBR, but converted real time to GPT. It takes about 10 seconds, and thankfully it told me it was successful.

From there, we have to switch from BIOS to UEFI, or the disk will not be seen, as the message at the bottom states. Powered off, F2, switch to UEFI, reboot, and it booted no issues.

Now the drive has to be cloned. For this I used Samsung's data migration software that handily is included with all their new drives (though I suppose any cloning software should work fine), and went to clone. No issues.

Thankfully this thing is empty, and literally copied in under 5 mins. It automatically copies the disk AS IS, so that means if the source disk is MBR, but the target is GPT, it's becoming MBR. Ask me how I know.

From there, I had to then wipe the source 850, or you will get a signature clash that prevents you booting one or the other. All or nothing at this point. For this, back to trusty disk part. This one does have to be done outside the OS, so restart, hold shift, and into command prompt, then the following.

This now means the 850 is blank, and the 960 theoretically should be the primary drive. Time to reboot and check the boot loading options.

That's a very excellent sign, and viola, back to the 960, back to GPT and back in business.

To get the 850 back in service, I created a new simple volume which is very easy, and now I'm back to my 2 SSD config, and transferring all my data back over as this is being written.

A couple of notes. 1, I never removed either SSD from the unit. Wasn't necessary. They both stayed in at all times. 2, not all versions of windows have this mbr2gpt conversion tool apparently. Google for more information. 3, the driver for the wifi card automatically installed, and the battery works as expected. Boot loop fixed.

I updated this because hopefully someone having a similar problem will find this helpful, as most of these threads just sit and never include a resolution.

TL, DR: It works now.

Mr_Morningstar

Quick update, after doing more reading, seems I may not have conditioned the battery properly. Was supposed to be fully charged, which is obviously was not. Might be how we ended up here 🤷🏾‍♂️

Regardless, tried the 3 failed starts to force it enter the recovery environment process, which failed. 

Mr_Morningstar

First, thanks for the overwhelming response and support to this thread; it's truly appreciated. Clearly with the staggering amount of responses and suggestions I received, I had no idea where to start, so I ended up just fixing it myself.

Sarcasm intended.

But on a serious note, for those that are still experiencing this problem, I did figure it out, but obviously no 2 situations are the exact same. My solution below.

Just to recap how I got here, I installed a new battery, and also a new Intel AX200 wifi 6 card. I didn't condition the battery or download the drivers for the card first though, so we ended up with only the Acer loading screen, and no progress. Either or could've caused the condition.

It's debatable what actually happened here, but in any event I somehow damaged the bootloader, which traditional recovery software (recovery discs, Hiren's CD, boot repair disk, etc) can usually make short work of fixing. One very important detail I left out is that I have a 960 Pro NVME SSD for my OS, and that pretty much is why nothing I tried worked.

As it's an NVME drive, this storage solution favors GPT over the MBR partitioning system, meaning that it will only work via UEFI, NOT legacy BIOS. In UEFI mode, all I received was an Acer logo, and an infinite boot loop. No changes to the boot order, no USBs, no CDs, NOTHING worked or could be accessed. Just a black screen with a logo. Sucks. When I switched to legacy BIOS and attempted to get into the recovery environment with ALT-F10, restarting 3 times, changing the boot order via F2, everything failed, 100% because of the NVME drive not being seen and thus neither the OS = no repair is done.

Common sense kicked in, and I realized all the disks the PC came with originally where configured in MBR, so my recovery disk are designed for legacy; this means we have to recover in BIOS. I created a live boot repair disk USB, booted in legacy, copied my NVME and 850 SSD and went to reinstall windows.

At the "install now" screen, I received an error about attempting install on a GPT disk, so as most people know hopefully, command prompt is available via Shift+F10. I went into diskpart, selected the 850 SSD, cleaned, converted to MBR, and successfully reinstalled windows 10 fresh. Many many updates later (literally HOURS), I got to a stable point where everything worked as expected, but I'm still running the 850, which is MBR, and still need to transfer back to the primary 960, which is GPT, so now a conversion has to happen.

Thankfully someone at Microsoft decided it was stupid to have to wipe your drive to convert, and that paying $50 bucks to AOMEI or something is bad business practices, so windows now has a tool called MBR2GPT which......converts from MBR to GPT. Tada.

So, I went thru the process of validating the disk could be converted, and then did that. The crazy thing is that though it clearly states this is designed to be used outside the OS, this was done, with the computer on, using the exact disk I'm converting, currently in MBR, but converted real time to GPT. It takes about 10 seconds, and thankfully it told me it was successful.

From there, we have to switch from BIOS to UEFI, or the disk will not be seen, as the message at the bottom states. Powered off, F2, switch to UEFI, reboot, and it booted no issues.

Now the drive has to be cloned. For this I used Samsung's data migration software that handily is included with all their new drives (though I suppose any cloning software should work fine), and went to clone. No issues.

Thankfully this thing is empty, and literally copied in under 5 mins. It automatically copies the disk AS IS, so that means if the source disk is MBR, but the target is GPT, it's becoming MBR. Ask me how I know.

From there, I had to then wipe the source 850, or you will get a signature clash that prevents you booting one or the other. All or nothing at this point. For this, back to trusty disk part. This one does have to be done outside the OS, so restart, hold shift, and into command prompt, then the following.

This now means the 850 is blank, and the 960 theoretically should be the primary drive. Time to reboot and check the boot loading options.

That's a very excellent sign, and viola, back to the 960, back to GPT and back in business.

To get the 850 back in service, I created a new simple volume which is very easy, and now I'm back to my 2 SSD config, and transferring all my data back over as this is being written.

A couple of notes. 1, I never removed either SSD from the unit. Wasn't necessary. They both stayed in at all times. 2, not all versions of windows have this mbr2gpt conversion tool apparently. Google for more information. 3, the driver for the wifi card automatically installed, and the battery works as expected. Boot loop fixed.

I updated this because hopefully someone having a similar problem will find this helpful, as most of these threads just sit and never include a resolution.

TL, DR: It works now.