Soldered RAM failure after a year and a half Aspire 5

DrewS

Hi Community,

My mom's Acer Aspire 5 started having issues (spontaneous crashes) a couple months ago. I finally had a chance to visit and troubleshoot a couple days ago--windows was giving constant "page fault in nonpaged area" errors. First, I removed the unsoldered ram stick--this did not fix things, the crashes continued. Next, I tried to install a clean copy of windows via USB. I was unable to do this, the computer crashed constantly during the installation process. Finally, I resorted to booting from a Ubuntu live USB. This worked some of the time, however when trying to install Ubuntu, the installer

failed with a "kernel panic not syncing fatal exception" error. This was all performed with only the soldered RAM in the machine.

Of course, since this laptop was purchased (new) in late 2019, it no longer qualifies for a warranty... this can't be a common issue, and I genuinely feel awful I recommended this laptop to her and now she can't even get it fixed. I know RAM errors are very uncommon, and I imagine acer has a far longer warranty agreement on ram with their supplier given how rare these issues are. Is there any way that this could be looked into further or a warranty claim could be considered? I see even 2018 laptops had at least a two year warranty, and the change to the policy has absolutely screwed my mom (and me) over here. At this point, I can't even boot into regular windows without multiple tries, let alone do anything. I would appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks,

rich1974

My guess is that the only solution is replacing the mobo, since the ram is soldered.

Other way around is to use only unsoldered RAM. But how to disable soldered stick?

How did you know for sure that RAM is the culprit? Have you test the RAM with bios or some other program?

JackE

Try this. F2 into the BIOS menu on startup. Change to legacy mode. F10 to save settings and exit. Press and hold power button till machine shuts off. Insert ubuntu stick. Turn machine on. Select memtest86 on the grub menu to check RAM.

DrewS

Hi guys, I appreciate the replies. I had time to troubleshoot some more today. As far as I can tell, there is no way to disable soldered memory whatsoever, or else I would glady try to do so. I ran memtest86 from an ISO for 8 passes (about 7 hours) during the day (since neither OS was stable), and to my surprise no errors showed up. However, everything else is still pointing to a memory issue, or perhaps some other chipset issue.

I tried to reinstall windows from a USB, and managed to get past the formatting stage, only to have it crash during a point at which windows had to reboot. This corrupted the install process and the system got stuck in a reboot loop, showing a variety of error messages...in total, I've seen all of the following bluescreen messages, and I'm sure a few more popped up I didn't bother to note:

page fault in nonpaged area
critical process died
kernel security check failure
attempted execute of noexecute memory

kmode exception not handled

After getting it stuck in a boot loop, I swapped out the nvme drive for a spare I had, and was getting the same errors--I was unable to install windows even on a new drive. I swapped the boot looped drive into my main machine and managed to get windows to install properly that way. When in my desktop, the drive booted normally functioned normally. But the second I put it back into the laptop, I continued to get the same host of errors before eventually getting to boot in. As is now it's on, but I anticipate it could crash at any point.

About the only thing I haven't tried is flashing a new BIOS. I've swapped out every possible component, tried replacing windows, have run sfc /scannow,  chkdsk, and memtest86, and tried every other trick under the sun I know from a decade of troubleshooting machines. Even on the clean install of windows, I get the same issues  This really seems to me like some sort of freak hardware issue which frankly just shouldn't be happening after a little more than a year of exceedingly light use--be it ram or some other mobo/chipset issue. 

JackE

>>>Next, I tried to install a clean copy of windows via USB. I was unable to do this>>>

Before doing this, did you try the ALT+F10 cold boot factory reset from the card's hidden recovery partition?

DrewS

I hadn't tried this, no... I imagine it would have frozen up and crashed like every other method, though. 

Also, I checked and the BIOS tool stated my BIOS is up to date with the most recent version, so I'm pretty much out of ideas for further troubleshooting.

I did notice there's an HDD connector on the mobo, and space within the chassis for an HDD, I might try to buy a ribbon cable and slap a 2.5" drive in there to see if it's an issue connecting to the pci drive. That's not what the error messages imply the issue is, but it's the only remaining thing I can think of.

By the way, if providing the bluescreen logs would be of any use in troubleshooting, I could provide those.

JackE

>>>page fault in nonpaged area
critical process died
kernel security check failure
attempted execute of noexecute memory

kmode exception not handled>>>

These error messages that you already posted suggests but don't prove something else is amiss besides the card. However, the card's hidden partition might still be accessible by the ALT+F10 procedure if the D2D option is turned on in the BIOS. So I think it's worth a shot before trying anything else at this point.