Good afternoon, all.
I hope someone can give a few suggestions for this issue.
I've been given an Aspire A315-21 to try to repair for someone who said "it keeps going round in circles downloading updates".
When powered on it was trying to rebuild itself after updates have seemingly failed, although mostly it just sits with the acer logo showing.
Apparently it's not been used for the last 2 years and was received new ~3 or so years ago and now needs to be rebuilt so it can be reused for charitable purposes - new recipient waiting for it.
After several attempts to get it to repair itself or get to the troubleshooting menu i gave up trying to fix what was there. It would just sit there with the Acer logo, occasionally showing "please wait" with the "twirly dots" just above it. Or "running diagnostics". Then the screen goes went blank and nothing further. Never a blue advanced/troubleshooting/repair menu
Time for a fresh win10 re-install build from USB memory created by the MS media creation tool.
Went to the BIOS, enabled the F12 boot menu and changed the boot order with USB first. Restarted with the newly created USB win10 image, got to the F12 boot menu and selected the USB, but then nothing happened - screen just turned black and comes back to the Acer logo. This happened several times as i tried it each each - It never showed "starting windows" or whatever that message normally shows when starting an install.
Tried booting again from the original HDD - as before: "please wait" and black screen, or just the acer logo.
Tried other keys presses such as Alt-F10, F8, Shift during power on; all seem to have no impact - nothing happens. And, tried the battery button on the underneath - same. Not a keyboard issue as i've used it with an external one, and not USB related - tried different USB ports and different USB memory devices (maker, USB2/3, capacity), too - all to no avail.
Moved the HDD to a USB/SATA caddy and tried it in connected to my (Dell) laptop to check the HDD was ok. However, Windows Disk Manager couldn't properly read the disk (partition) details, diskpart took an age to perform any action (list disk, etc), and other partition tools (minitool) wouldn't startup correctly. Other drives connected by USB or USB/Sata respond "correctly" so i know MY laptop is still working normally.
So my laptop doesn't recognise it enough to even run chkdsk (etc) on it . All this so far suggests that the HDD isn't in a good state .
Tried a spare (empty) HDD in the Acer so i could try to rebuild win10 newly to that and got the same issue as before - cannot boot from USB. And it's an empty HDD so can't boot from it anyway. Tried removing the HDD and having the USB device as the only boot drive, and still it doesn't boot from it - black screen, then the Acer logo.
The BIOS is very old - ver 1.03, and i noticed that when i save/exit any BIOS changes with F10 then the BIOS screen program stops, but the PC doesn't restart. i need to power off with the power button which struck me as pretty odd/unusual and leads me to suspect something with the BIOS. The USB boots on my laptop to start installing windows, so i know that works.
Back to the USB memory, it was created by the MS creation tool with a FAT32 MBR partition, so changed it to GPT but no change. And, tried using Legacy BIOS with all 3 devices (empty HDD, original HDD, USB) - the same.
It's my first time working on an Acer so a little unfamiliar with any specific requirements and I don't really know what this machine is actually doing, or trying to do, or how far it's getting - no obvious reporting, logging, or signs of a POST.
I'm now stumped as to what to try next. I'm tempted to think that during a BIOS upgrade it failed and now the BIOS is corrupted meaning nothing will boot, corrupting the HDD In the process and making it impossible to update the BIOS to a later version. Although i'm now getting out of my depth...
The HDD seems unhealthy whatever happened, but a different HDD doesn't seem any better.
So what are my options now? Anything else i can try?
Cheers,
