Aspire V7 591G Nitro occasionally runs slowly and crashes with BSOD. I cannot run chkdsk.

drtomato
drtomato Member Posts: 5 New User
edited March 2023 in 2017 Archives

The machine had Win 8 installed at the time purchase, then it was upgraded by my son to Win 10 Home. Initially there were no problems running e.g. YouTube with HD content but lately, the machine sometimes lags (viewing HD video and editing video in Adobe Premiere then becomes virtually impossible, which is unfathomable on a Core i7 machine with 16GB of RAM) and then sometimes crashes with BSOD. I have re-installed Win 10 from scratch and this seemed to work fine initially, then the problems above started to re-occur. The Acer factory reset procedure (ALT-F10 at boot) does not work so I suspect that the recovery partition may have been destroyed sometime during the upgrades.

 

Also, every time I boot, a brief message about "Scanning and repairing drive (\\?\Volume{cc711c7d-72ff-4f66-b739-etc}): 100% complete" flushes by. I therefore suspect a hardware problem with one of the drives (the C drive is an SSD and the D drive is a regular drive) but I cannot get the command interpreter to open at boot to run chkdsk manually, the machine always brings up the GUI whatever I do.

 

I also ran Memtest from a bootable USB. It showed no problems with the memory.

 

Any ideas on how to proceed would be much appreciated!

 

P.S. I run the latest BIOS: 1.15

 

Answers

  • drtomato
    drtomato Member Posts: 5 New User

    Thanks for the tip. Using Disk Manager I can now see the following configuration:

     

    Disk 0:

    • 600 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition)
    • 300 MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)
    • Acer (CSmiley Happy 220 GB NTFS, Healthy (Boot, Page File, ...)
    • 17 GB Healthy (Recovery Partition)

    Disk 1:

    • Data (DSmiley Happy 931 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)

     

    However, according to the Disk Manager, all partitions except for C and D are 100% free. Does that mean that they are really free or just unused by Windows? When I select any of these "shadow" partitions in Disk Manager, there is no right context menu where I can actually do something with them... I assume that the error message I get when I boot is related to one of these partitions but has that really anything to do with the performance problems I am experiencing? 

     

  • Hi,

    You need to backup the whole image of your disk before deleting the recovery partition, I would suggest you to do it with Macrium Reflect free and also create a recovery disk(need to recover the backed up image).

    You may have to use a third party program to delete those partitions, recovery partition is invisible to windows explorer, the reason for 100% free.

    https://www.howtogeek.com/139710/remove-your-pc%E2%80%99s-recovery-partition-and-take-control-of-your-hdd/

     

     

  • drtomato
    drtomato Member Posts: 5 New User

    Thanks. I checked out Macrium, it seems to be really good tool to have in my toolbox! I already have backup of all my content so that's OK but why would I want to wipe the recovery partition? Admittedly, it doesn't seem to be working but it does no damage just sitting there so what would be solved by wiping it?

     

    I finally managed to run chkdsk on the disks after learning that under Win10 you no longer F8 to the command line but SHIFT-Restart... :-) According to chkdsk, the disks are fine. I ran a boot sector repair anyway and restarted. However, I still got the annoying message "Scanning and repairing drive (\\?\Volume{cc711c7d-72ff-4f66-b739-etc}): 100% complete". I then restarted the machine successfully a couple of times until suddenly the machine stopped booting with a "No boot device" message. I then tried to restart in BIOS Legacy mode and got a different screen but essentially the same message - no boot device. I then shifted back to UEFI and suddenly the machine booted again. So, what could be wrong? Apparently the disks are fine (or are they really?) but what do you think, could there be cable problems or, even worse, motherboard chip problems? And how can I find out when these errors occur only intermittently?

  • Hi,

    I would suggest you to wait for someone else more experienced to chime in as I have no ideaSmiley Sad

  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer

    let's find which files are giving the repair error:

    windows logo key + r

    then copy and paste the volume name

    (\\?\Volume{cc711c7d-72ff-4f66-b739-etc})

    press enter

     

    it will open the file explorer where the errors appear.

     

    by the way, i suspect a problem on the SSD, since the EFI partition is on the SSD and that no bootable device is not a good sign.

     

    you can try to do another windows clean install but this time, wiping completly the SSD.

    you need to press shift+f10 during language/keyboard selection on windows install, then:

    type

    diskpart

    list disk    (check the SSD number)

    sel disk x (x is the number of your SSD, normally 0)

    clean all

     

    wait until it finishes and then close the command prompt and continue with windows 10 installation.

     

    oh...ALT+F10 is not working because windows 10 upgrade bypassed the factory recovery partition (17GB Acer partition) with its own.

    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • drtomato
    drtomato Member Posts: 5 New User

    Thanks for the good ideas on how to proceed! I am travelling now but should be able to try out your suggestions in a week or so. I'll report back then!

  • drtomato
    drtomato Member Posts: 5 New User

    OK, I finally got back to trying to fix the machine.

     

    Opening the drive as you suggested unfortunately did not work but using the MOUNTVOL command from a command prompt did - it showed that the erronous volume was one of the unmounted ones. I than ran 

     

    chkdsk "(\\?\Volume{cc711c7d-72ff-4f66-b739-etc})" /f

     

    from an elevated command prompt, which did the trick - a lof of erronous MFT and file system entries were fixed and the startup error is now gone. The machine now seems to work correctly but I am still worried that the volume errors were the symptom of other problems rather than vice versa. I don't feel like reinstalling the machine unless I really have to, so I'll wait and see if the problems come back. Thanks for your kind assistance sofar!