Aspire Z24-890 Wont Boot up, trying to reinstall windows

Scott_McB
Scott_McB Member Posts: 3 New User
edited March 1 in 2020 Archives
So I bought a refurbished Z24-890 from Best Buy in february.  Everything was running perfectly fine until this week, and I have no idea what happened.

Windows attempts an automatic repair when you turn it on, and then says it cannot be repaired.  Cant boot into safe mode.  

So I created a Windows 10 USB stick with the media creation tool, and got it to boot off of that.  But it cant find the drive, I'm guessing because of the intel Optane built in?

So I downloaded the acer drivers for intel rapid storage, and tried loading the drivers when you get to the window allowing you to choose the drive and partition to install windows on, but it tells me there are no signed drivers.

I also switch the SATA to turn off the optane, and then the windows installer sees the drive and the partitions, but it refuses to install on any of them, almost like they are read-only, even though diskpart says they are not. 

So now i'm tired and upset that it just isnt easy to reinstall windows 10 on these machines.

Any help anyone can offer at this point would be greatly appreciated.


Answers

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 31,454 Trailblazer
    The Intel Optane drive is used to cache data for the HDD and really shouldn't be in the way of an install, the HDD should still look like a HDD. Try popping the Optane card out and have another go at it. The HDD may be in a failure mode, which would explain the initial symptoms. If so you'd have to replace it, and I'd choose to pick up an NVMe M.2 SSD to put in instead of the Optane. Your whole system will breath a sigh of relief (but it'll be a really fast sigh). :)
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  • Scott_McB
    Scott_McB Member Posts: 3 New User
    The system actually came with a 512gb ssd.  So maybe the ssd crapped out?  It seems like its somehow in read-only mode.
  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 31,454 Trailblazer
    Usually 'read only' means the volume is known as corrupt, so the OS won't let you write to it. A chkdsk will often clean it up enough to get things working while you go through the replacement process.
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  • Scott_McB
    Scott_McB Member Posts: 3 New User
    So it appears the m.2 ssd was dyeing.  It shows up in the BIOS, but today windows no longer even shows it.  I opened it up and pulled the m.2 ssd out, and dropped it into a laptop that I have that takes m.2 ssds, and that machine doesn't even see it at all.

    So i've ordered a new m.2 ssd to put in there.  Hopefully life will be good after that.


  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 31,454 Trailblazer
    Sounds like it should! Too bad you had to go through it...
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