Boot Issue Acer Aspire 5

Elitepic

So I recently installed an extra harddrive onto my Acer Aspire 5 and it seemed to have somehow caused a boot issue on my local drive. I was asked to restart the computer to repair my drive and then once I did the computer wouldn't boot past the acer logo (freezes right before showing the swirling dots). It can still get to the BIOS menu just fine and I'm able to make changes in it but I can't access the boot menu with F12 or the repair menu with Alt+F10. I took out the extra harddrive and tried: reseting everything in the BIOS to default, pressing/holding the button to the battery through the bottom, and trying to boot in safe mode and yet nothing seems to work. Is it done for or is there anything else I can try to fix it?

{ edited the title to add model name } 

StevenGen

Elitepic said:

So I recently installed an extra harddrive onto my Acer Aspire 5 and it seemed to have somehow caused a boot issue on my local drive. I was asked to restart the computer to repair my drive and then once I did the computer wouldn't boot past the acer logo (freezes right before showing the swirling dots). It can still get to the BIOS menu just fine and I'm able to make changes in it but I can't access the boot menu with F12 or the repair menu with Alt+F10. I took out the extra harddrive and tried: reseting everything in the BIOS to default, pressing/holding the button to the battery through the bottom, and trying to boot in safe mode and yet nothing seems to work. Is it done for or is there anything else I can try to fix it?

I don’t know which Aspire 5 model you have but I presume that your boot drive is an M.2 type drive and your new 2nd drive is a 2.5" mechanical or SSD drive? The problems that you are having with your 2nd drive is because it wasn’t formatted and recognised and you must have damaged the boot files somehow? What did you do? As just putting a new 2nd drive into a laptop does not damage the boot drive or its files. I suggest that after you have done and tried all the steps below and you can boot from the original boot drive and the 2.5” 2nd drive is recognised in “Disk Management” as an empty drive, you should format this new 2nd disk through “Disk Management”, as it should work as that is how its done. 

Now and if you use Windows 10 and this happens, follow these steps and download Windows 10 from the below link and create media creation tool “Installing Windows 10 using the media creation tool” then do this:

• Place Windows disk in your system and boot from it
• Now, tap on Repair your computer after selecting the language, time, and keyboard input
• choose the Windows installation drive, which is C:\ most of the time, and click Next
• Choose command prompt when you see system recovery options on the screen.
• Write the chkdsk C: /f command and press enter then enter this:

Run chkdsk > chkdsk C: /R

If that doesn’t work then perform a Startup Repair.
I would like to inform you that, if your Windows 10 is not able to boot or startup, Automatic Repair will come into action and try to diagnose and fix the issue. It will scan system files, registry settings, configuration settings and more and try to fix the problem on its own, automatically. Perform the Startup Repair:

1. When your computer starts, wait for the manufacturer logo to check the option for boot menu, it will usually be F2 or F12.

2. Restart the computer, when the manufacturer's logo is displayed, keep pressing the Boot menu option key to enter the boot menu and change the boot option to USB.

3. After you boot your computer using Windows 10 USB, a black screen appears with grey text "Press any key to boot from USB". Press any key.

4. Select the correct time and Keyboard type.
5. Click Repair your computer in the lower left corner
6. Click on Troubleshooting, advanced option and then click Startup repair.

Good luck and hope this helps you out as if it does not then and if you have valuable data on your boot drive? Then you either get all your data recovered by a recovery software tech or you can try to recover your valuable data yourself and use a software called "Active@ File Recovery" as its easy to use and works very well (I've used it myself and it works 100%) but you need to install this on another PC and connect your damaged boot drive to that PC with this software, otherwise just reinstall Win-10 OS and do a clean install of Win-10 over your boot drive with the new 2.5” drive installed as that will recognise both drives.