Aspire A515-51-3509 cannot get past Acer Logo, bios reset and alt-F10 did not solve/cannot access.

I have access to bios and did a settings reset after holding the battery button for 30s.

There is no spinning wheel, ONLY the logo, and holding alt+f10 before power up did nothing; tapping alt+f10 after powering up also doing nothing.

Powering on and off again 5 or 6 times did not trigger anything.

Family member's computer, claims it froze playing a game and so they turned it off. Presumably they turned it back on again to see if it was fixed and then back off. BIOS indicates D2D recovery is currently enabled and secure boot is enabled. Cannot change the secure boot setting.

Currently letting it sit on the logo to see if anything happens since opening BIOS takes like 15-30s after pressing f2.

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AaronS1

Update: The spinning wheel just appeared after 30 minutes.

JackE

Go back into the BIOS. Check that the F12 boot menu is also enabled in BIOS Main tab. Then set and save a supervisor password. Then re-enter the BIOS with the password an disable secure boot. Then shut it down. Then turn it back on and IMMEDIATELY press and hold ALTkey while tapping the F10.

If still no joy, then prepare a bootable Win10 installation stick using Microsoft's USB media creation tool. Insert the stick. Turn the machine on and immmediately start tapping the F12 key to reveal a menu to boot from the stick.

AaronS1

Thank you Jack. It displayed "Please wait" and then crashed after about 3-6 hours with the error "driver pnp watchdog." After it restarted it is now stuck on "Preparing Automatic Repair".

I will be attempting the bootable Win10 flashdrive later as I have no spare flash drives lying around. I will update on the results of that when I get to it unless the driver pnp error suggests I need to do something else.

JackE

Try the ALT+F10 trick at least twice more before giving up on it. It's stubborn sometimes.

AaronS1

Tried alt+f10 3-5 more times, each time always gets stuck on "Please Wait" or doesn't seem to recognize I pressed anything (forever on acer logo).

Downloaded creation tool, followed steps for putting windows 10 (64-bit EN) onto USB, plugged into laptop, f12 spam at start, changed to boot from flash drive. Did this twice and both times it stayed on acer logo with spinning wheel for about 10 minutes then crashed to the driver_pnp_watchdog error again.

Also tried setting USB to priority boot with enabled secure boot in bios. After saving and it restarting the acer logo appeared for about a minute, flashed off and back on again if my eyes weren't playing tricks on me (I have it setup next to me so I can do other stuff), and then the same old spinning wheel for like 10 minutes with another watchdog crash.

Also tried the alt+f10 twice under the bios changes. Same results as previously with getting stuck somewhere.

JackE

Can you get to the troubleshooting command prompt from the Win10 installation stick? If yes, enter 'diskpart'. Then at the diskpart prompt enter 'list disk'. Post of phone photo of result if possible.

AaronS1

I cannot get anywhere besides the BIOS, the acer logo, and the pnp_watchdog blue screen. Would disconnecting the main drive be worthwhile to attempt accessing the USB's installation?

JackE

Make sure the F12 boot option is enabled in the BIOS Main tab. Then shut down again. Turn the machine back on and immediately start tapping the F12 key. A menu should appear to allow you to boot from the Win10 installation stick. From there you should be able to bring up the command prompt and run diskpart from the troubleshooting section.

AaronS1

Sorry if I was not clear before, I have selected to boot from the USB multiple times via F12 and it always gets stuck on the loading dots (I have a 2 hour recording of it if you really wanted to see it).

I have removed the hard drive and it boots from the USB just fine, plug hard drive back in and it's forever stuck on loading dots (removal and re-adding drive done while unplugged and powered off).

Feels like the hard drive's fault based on that test. I have a trash computer I can throw the drive into to do troubleshooting if that's a possibility. Otherwise probably can just get a new drive without any data recovery on the old drive.

JackE

If the USB stick won't boot to the troublshooting menu option screen with HDD connected, then yes the HDD has failed. You may be able to recover data from it by connecting it to the USB port of another computer with an inexpensive 2.5" usb-to-hdd/ssd adapter. Less than $10usd.