Acer Helios extremely slow boot but OS works fine

I got a Acer Helios with Intel 10th gen. All of a sudden, when I reboot, the screen stays black for a long time. It takes about 1 minute to display the Predator logo (then possible to open BIOS but EXTREMELY slow!!), 1 minute to get to the OS boot menu, but once the OS boots up, the computer works fine.

By doing some searches, some had issues with the battery. Put the battery in the fridge; laptop behaves the same with or without battery. Not a battery issue.

Some had issues with NVMe drives. I removed both NVMe drives and the issue remains. Not an NVMe issue. (I did not try removing the mechanical drive)

This is a really weird one. What could be causing this and how to solve?

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Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/705058/acer-helios-extremely-slow-boot-but-os-works-fine

Enable Fast Boot in BIOS will speed up the 2nd boot phase you describe, the first (slow) phase is caused by your HDD (spinner) that you should replace with a 2.5" SSD Sata-3 like a Samsung 870 Evo V-NAND 2TB. Total boot time for Windows11 23H2 is maximum 30 seconds the moment you press the power button till you see the Windows desktop (idle).

Mystery9

Removed the HDD. Problem remains.

I can get into the BIOS, but the mouse barely works, and the keyboard doesn't work at all. Thus I can't get into advanced options nor do anything. I keep F10 pressed for 10 seconds and the message box never appears. BIOS is not usable.

Computer works fine but certain things are slow; like plugging USB devices take longer to be recognized.

Fans are spinning way too fast, let me try removing those… (just kidding)

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1273508#Comment_1273508

You can't use the mouse or touchpad in Acer BIOS, you need to use the arrow up-down, right-left and the enter key to navigate, Fn keys also work. 😉

Mystery9

There is actually a mouse in the Acer BIOS and it moves with the touchpad (with a few seconds delay). It doesn't respond to any keyboard inputs; but the F2/F10 keyboard input does work to get to the BIOS.

Acer's graphical BIOS is very different from any other BIOS I've seen btw!

Mystery9

After doing further research, others have experienced such issue and doesn't seem specific to Acer. It generally comes down to faulty hard drive or faulty USB device, which, after unplugging, works fine.