Swift 3 Won't Go Past Loading Screen

Model: SF314-54G-815P
BIOS: InsydeH2O v1.14

Hello Acer Community! I hope everyone's doing well. I have a little problem with my Swift 3 laptop. About 3 days ago, I turned my laptop on and the spinning beads just kept spinning. Kept it that way for 30 minutes before deciding to force shut down it. Pressed the power button for 10 seconds til it resets then pressed the battery reset button for 30 seconds. Rested the device for 30 minutes, turned the laptop on and this time it says "Preparing Automatic Repair" but it ends up with a blank screen. Tried Alt+F10 and yet again, a blank screen afterwards. So I went ahead and checked the BIOS where I can see both the SSD and HDD are identified and detected under the Information tab but when I head over to the Boot tab, only Windows Boot Manager is listed under Boot Priority. Setting up a supervisor password didn't help either. I can't do a recovery if the screen keeps going blank. No software/hardware upgrades or updates were installed recently, except for the Logitech wired mouse I bought 5 days ago, but it's not like it has anything to do with the problem, right? Tried searching for answers on countless blogs including here in Acer Community but to no avail. Hoping you guys could help me out as I rely on this laptop for work.

Many thanks!
-Yanix

P.S. - I made a post similar to this about 2 days ago but it never showed up, so I'll apologize ahead of time if a duplicate is present.

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StevenGen

Yanix said:

Model: SF314-54G-815P
BIOS: InsydeH2O v1.14

Hello Acer Community! I hope everyone's doing well. I have a little problem with my Swift 3 laptop. About 3 days ago, I turned my laptop on and the spinning beads just kept spinning. Kept it that way for 30 minutes before deciding to force shut down it. Pressed the power button for 10 seconds til it resets then pressed the battery reset button for 30 seconds. Rested the device for 30 minutes, turned the laptop on and this time it says "Preparing Automatic Repair" but it ends up with a blank screen. Tried Alt+F10 and yet again, a blank screen afterwards. So I went ahead and checked the BIOS where I can see both the SSD and HDD are identified and detected under the Information tab but when I head over to the Boot tab, only Windows Boot Manager is listed under Boot Priority. Setting up a supervisor password didn't help either. I can't do a recovery if the screen keeps going blank. No software/hardware upgrades or updates were installed recently, except for the Logitech wired mouse I bought 5 days ago, but it's not like it has anything to do with the problem, right? Tried searching for answers on countless blogs including here in Acer Community but to no avail. Hoping you guys could help me out as I rely on this laptop for work.

Many thanks!
-Yanix

P.S. - I made a post similar to this about 2 days ago but it never showed up, so I'll apologize ahead of time if a duplicate is present.

I’ve answered this for you in your other post but, you had a different error message like 0xC000025 that I provided a solution from Microsoft for, with this “Windows Boot Manager” error you need to go into the "Boot" tab to change bios mode from UEFI/GPT to MBR (Legacy mode) and then the HDD’s will be shown in the "Boot" tab in bios.

After this if you want UEFI/GPT mode you will have to convert your boot drive from MBR (Legacy) disk mode to UEFI GPT disk mode, for that its necessary to do a clean install of Windows 10 so that the HDD is in UEFI/GPT disk mode or (which I don’t recommend) look up a guide “How to Convert Legacy to UEFI without Data Loss in Windows 10”.

billsey

Your system came with Windows 10 preinstalled, so you don't want to change to Legacy mode, that's only used with Windows 7 and earlier. Likely the laptop was doing a big Windows update when you were seeing the juggling balls and it just didn't get done before you forced the power off (An update like the May 2020 version 2004 often can take an hour or two to complete). When you force a power off like that it has a chance of corrupting the disk if it happens to hit just as it's in the middle or writing an important file. I'd guess that is what happened here. Your best bet is to recover back to just before the update and run the update again until it's finished.

Showing only Windows Boot Manager is the norm for UEFI systems, Windows Boot Manager is the UEFI boot system that then allows you to choose between EFI boot environments if you do the F12 thing. Normally there's only one option, to boot from C:, but if you have Secure Boot turned off and you place other boot environments in the system (like a Windows boot image flash drive or a Linux install on another partition) they will show up in the list.

So, first step is to try and recover the install using a System Restore Point, you can do that from the diagnostic menu. You likely will find the menu easiest by powering down during the repair process three times in a row.

Next, if that doesn't work or you have no restore points, is to use SFC and DISM from the command line in that same diagnostics menu. Those check your system to see if the files match the version of Windows you are supposed to be at. They will restore any files that are corrupted or the wrong version. You might have to download a 2004 install image and create the appropriate flash drive for them to use in determining what's correct and what's not.

Let us know as you progress and if you need more detailed instructions.

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