TravelMate B114-21 - Unable to Boot up Windows 10, and Unable to Repair Windows Install

JF1513

Hello,

Running into an issue with my girlfriend's notebook she uses for school - it's an Acer TravelMate B1 B114-21 TMB114-21-4434 that's about two years old. The notebook is no longer able to boot up properly. It was just getting stuck in a cycle of "Diagnosing the PC/Repairing Disk Errors", which went nowhere, even after running for 12+ hours. Have tried a few things so far, neither of which have been successful.

• Created a Windows Installation Media USB in order to attempt to repair Windows. Booting from it, whether it's by using the Boot Menu (F12) or changing the Boot Priority in BIOS to boot from the USB first isn't working. I'm just getting the Windows logo on a corrupted black screen (bottom half of the screen has a bunch of green error bars). It gets hung up there or eventually throws an error code ("Unmountable Boot Drive" has been the most common). Isn't an issue with the USB/Installation Media, as it boots up fine on another computer.
• Tried the various Alt + F10 Windows recovery options under the "Troubleshoot" menu. The default Troubleshoot option of "Reset this PC" just gives me a generic "There was a problem resetting your PC" error no matter what. Startup Repair just gets hung up on "Repairing Disk Errors" as described above. No System Restores to load up as the feature was never enabled.

Just wondering if anyone had any other suggestions, or if this may have just been some sort of hardware failure.

bluepen61

Apparently you can boot to bios. In bios information, does your hard drive appear?  Does it appear as expected?  Do your other bios settings appear as you expect?  Does your bios version number match one listed in Acer Support for your Travelmate (1.04, 1.05, or 1.06)? (Btw,I have no idea what your bios information or settings should be, as I am new to Travelmate Spin and learning with my newly acquired B311R-32.)  Trying to confirm if the system sees the hard drive, and sees it correctly.

If the system recognizes the hard drive correctly, can you use your usb to boot to Windows safe mode?  I am not sure if one can do this from usb.  But in safe mode you could then open Windows device manager from Control Panel and look for your hard drive there. If missing you might have a hard drive failure.

From usb, you should be able to go to a command prompt and run chkdsk on that drive though you would have to determine what drive letter that would be.  If there are errors, you could run chkdsk with the /r and /f options to possibly repair the errors.

billsey

It looks like that SKU came with an 64GB eMMC drive soldered to the motherboard. The eMMC drives fail much sooner than either the HDDs or the M.2 SSDs that most other SKUs had. It's still a bit early at only two years, but if she has had things setup such that a lot of writes happened, it could be at EOL for that drive. If so the best solution is to install a SSD in the M.2 slot and reinstall Windows to it. The drive should be an NVMe, but the system only supports x2 so it'll be slower than newer NVMe drives.

Now, booting from the Windows install flash drive using the F12 boot menu shouldn't try to load the (likely corrupted) EFI image on the eMMC drive. The symptoms you describe make me think it's trying to load that image though, not the one on the installer. How did you create the Windows install flash drive, and which version of Windows is on it?