How to fix Bsod upon boot Acer Aspire A515-54Xm

Triple3

I wrote the extent of the problem in a doc. Please read it and help me fix this.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bxcUmkZE9OIh63s2ZMZXTdquWWQtWgXPkwSgpR4GAQ/edit

JackE

Please try to very briefly describe your BSOD problem on this forum including full ACER model number to avoid having to refer to external links. I suggest you remove one-by-one each new upgrade component you've recently added to the system to see if one of them might be the cause of the BSOD. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

Please try to very briefly describe your BSOD problem on this forum including full ACER model number to avoid having to refer to external links. I suggest you remove one-by-one each new upgrade component you've recently added to the system to see if one of them might be the cause of the BSOD. Jack E/NJ

It’s an Acer Aspire A515-54Xm

Here are my laptop/system specs

Core I5 8250u

20Gb 2400 ram (4 Gb (onboard) & 16gb (removable))

Intel uhd 620 graphics

Western digital 250Gb nvme m.2 ssd

1Tb hdd 5400rpm (I don’t remember the model exactly but it shouldn’t matter)

If anybody is wondering it’s an Acer aspire 5 from 2017. 

 So to get straight to the point, I woke up and booted my laptop for it to Bsod (Blue screen of death). I am not very sure if I updated anything but I can remember that I updated to windows 20H2 a few days ago. I may have updated my drivers as well but I’m very unsure if I did.  After finding that the laptop would boot but would bsod I looked at a few of the stopcode errors.  A few of them are

1. System service exception

2. Kernel security check failure

3. Memory management 

My immediate reaction was to get my macrium recovery tool and use it to fix any boot errors which ended up doing nothing. 

It’s also good to note that I also received a message stating “a required device isn’t connected or can’t be accessed”. I’m not sure what this could be as everything hadn’t been touched since the night before when it was working fine. 

Anyway, I booted into macrium and everything seemed okay and I pressed the fix boot errors which didn’t end up helping in the long run. But when I tried to do the command chkdsk and sfc scannow, my pc would bsod again. Long story short, I found out that my ssd with windows on it had become corrupted and I also found out that many of these stop codes could result from a broken drive/ssd. However I also decided to try and do a fresh install of windows with the windows media tool. To do this I booted into the tool with my USB and deleted everything on my ssd. However when I tried to install windows it would bsod again! I also tried this on my hdd after wiping that as well thinking that my ssd may be corrupt but not my hard drive. It also bsod? Can anyone help me? Please ask any questions you may have when you answer and I will respond ASAP in the comments. This may be rushed because I’m really worried so please make sure to ask me and I’ll try to give you an answer.

JackE

>>> I woke up and booted my laptop for it to Bsod >>>>

Open Control Panel. Search 'restore point' . Click 'create a restore point' in left pane. If System Protection is turned on in the box that pops up, click on the System Restore button. Click next. Do you see a restore point listed with a date/time stamp that's immediately before the day or time you woke up and booted to a BSOD? Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

>>> I woke up and booted my laptop for it to Bsod >>>>

Open Control Panel. Search 'restore point' . Click 'create a restore point' in left pane. If System Protection is turned on in the box that pops up, click on the System Restore button. Click next. Do you see a restore point listed with a date/time stamp that's immediately before the day or time you woke up and booted to a BSOD? Jack E/NJ

There’s literally no OS on my pc. In attempt to fresh reinstall I deleted all partitions and tried to reinstall via windows media tool. However every time it tried to install it would bsod on 15% on the first step

JackE

Temporarily disconnect the HDD and try re-installing Win10 again on the m.2. Make sure it shows up in the BIOS Information tab before doing so. Also is SATA mode AHCI, not RAID, not iRST. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

Temporarily disconnect the HDD and try re-installing Win10 again on the m.2. Make sure it shows up in the BIOS Information tab before doing so. Also is SATA mode AHCI, not RAID, not iRST. Jack E/NJ

I have tried that. And from what I remembered it was on ahci. I’m currently trying to see if I can format my disk to ntfs via cmd prompt on the troubleshoot settings. Doing chkdsk /f and arc /scannow both makes my pc bsod.

JackE

The m.2 may be bad. They usually go catastrophically all at once though. Not piecemeal  sector here sector there like an HDD often does. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

The m.2 may be bad. They usually go catastrophically all at once though. Not piecemeal  sector here sector there like an HDD often does. Jack E/NJ

Yea that’s what I figured. Here are some pics tho 

JackE

There's something wrong with the total disk space reported. Only 3GB.  At the X : \ > prompt, enter 'diskpart'. At the diskpart > prompt enter 'list disk' and 'list volume ' Post phone photo of result if possible. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

There's something wrong with the total disk space reported. Only 3GB.  At the X : \ > prompt, enter 'diskpart'. At the diskpart > prompt enter 'list disk' and 'list volume ' Post phone photo of result if possible. Jack E/NJ

Yes. I also inquired in a discord server that does tech stuff and they said it’s a basic data corruption / disk is dead. However I wanted to check with you guys as well.

Sometime after my last post I formatted one of my drives to try an install it. I’m not sure if it will affect anything but here is the screen shot.

Triple3

Triple3 said:

JackE said:

There's something wrong with the total disk space reported. Only 3GB.  At the X : \ > prompt, enter 'diskpart'. At the diskpart > prompt enter 'list disk' and 'list volume ' Post phone photo of result if possible. Jack E/NJ

Yes. I also inquired in a discord server that does tech stuff and they said it’s a basic data corruption / disk is dead. However I wanted to check with you guys as well.

Sometime after my last post I formatted one of my drives to try an install it. I’m not sure if it will affect anything but here is the screen shot.

However I decided to clean both disks and this is what i get now. It’s different than the other pic so look at this one too.

JackE

Both drives are connected according to diskpart. Looks like your boot disk is the 1TB disk0, not the other disk1 that looks like a 512GB SSD. Are you sure it's a WD 250GB nvme? I think you need to remove the nvme card and try to boot from the 1TB drive by itself. Jack E/NJ

JackE

Aye. Did you wipe the 1TB disk0 drive? It probably would've booted on its own. Look at list disk command. It's the same before and after you wiped it. The list volume command will be different if it was wiped. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

Aye. Did you wipe the 1TB disk0 drive? It probably would've booted on its own. Look at list disk command. It's the same before and after you wiped it. The list volume command will be different if it was wiped. Jack E/NJ

I wrote 250? Sorry yea it’s a 512 Gb nvme ssd.i believe I wiped them. I did /clean although I really can’t be sure. I did select disk 1 then did /clean then did the same with the other

Triple3

JackE said:

Aye. Did you wipe the 1TB disk0 drive? It probably would've booted on its own. Look at list disk command. It's the same before and after you wiped it. The list volume command will be different if it was wiped. Jack E/NJ

I’m pretty sure though as I formatted atleast one of them before and it had fat32 files or whatever and after I wiped it just showed each disk and how much disk they had. And the list volume doesn’t show either disks. It only shows my USB which is fat 32...

JackE

The 1TB HDD Disk0 was likely the original factory Windows system drive. The 512GB nvme Disk1 was probably added later on because the factory would've loaded Windows on the nvme because it's faster. With both drives connected, you should run diskpart's list volume again to see if they're really clean.  Then I suggest try to load Windows again on the nvme Disk1 with the HDD Disk0 disconnected. Be forewarned however, that certain BIOS mainboards have problems booting from Disk1, Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

The 1TB HDD Disk0 was likely the original factory Windows system drive. The 512GB nvme Disk1 was probably added later on because the factory would've loaded Windows on the nvme because it's faster. With both drives connected, you should run diskpart's list volume again to see if they're really clean.  Then I suggest try to load Windows again on the nvme Disk1 with the HDD Disk0 disconnected. Be forewarned however, that certain BIOS mainboards have problems booting from Disk1, Jack E/NJ

I’ll try that right now. I doubt it will work but here goes nothing

Triple3

Triple3 said:

JackE said:

The 1TB HDD Disk0 was likely the original factory Windows system drive. The 512GB nvme Disk1 was probably added later on because the factory would've loaded Windows on the nvme because it's faster. With both drives connected, you should run diskpart's list volume again to see if they're really clean.  Then I suggest try to load Windows again on the nvme Disk1 with the HDD Disk0 disconnected. Be forewarned however, that certain BIOS mainboards have problems booting from Disk1, Jack E/NJ

I’ll try that right now. I doubt it will work but here goes nothing

Okay so I disconnected the HDD and did disk part and did list volume and list disk. I have attached the image of the results. I’m currently trying to download windows on my ssd. 

Update: it bsod again. With the disk out with stop code: memory management. 

I just took out the 4gb Removeable module so my pc only has 4gb at the moment. So I’m installing with 4gb and nvme. 

Update: after trying with 4gb it gave me a new stop code. Kmode_exception_not handled 

Then I tried again and it gave me system service exception

im going to try once more and see what it says upon bsod

Attempt 3 results:system thread exception not handled

JackE

Remove the nvme Disk1. Then reconnect the 1TB HDD Disk0. Run diskpart's 'list volume' to see if you wiped  Disk0 clean. Then try to install Win10 on it. If it installs, then reconnect nvme Disk1. Then we go from there to see if the nvme can be revived as the D : \ drive again as it was originally set up. Jack E/NJ

Triple3

JackE said:

Remove the nvme Disk1. Then reconnect the 1TB HDD Disk0. Run diskpart's 'list volume' to see if you wiped  Disk0 clean. Then try to install Win10 on it. If it installs, then reconnect nvme Disk1. Then we go from there to see if the nvme can be revived as the D : \ drive again as it was originally set up. Jack E/NJ

Well I’m pretty sure I did that before but alright. I took out the nvme me and am booting up from the USB. If I’m correct I think that if it’s wiped then it won’t show any other volumes yes?

okay so I did list disk and list volume. It shows that my USB and the hdd are connected. However on list volume it only shows my USB and it’s called volume 0 with the letter being C. I will try to download windows again however I’m sure it will bsod again. I also connected the 4gb ram again because he’ll why not. It seemed to cause more errors with it out rather than when it’s inside.this is what I got when trying to install