Acer VN7-791G not booting

ksredman
ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User
edited October 2023 in 2019 Archives

At first it would just take a few power cycles and then it would come back.  Today I tried to restart it after Windows updates and it won't come back even after many hours of trying. 

 

Symptoms are the lights come on, fans spin up, but nothing on the screen.  Doesn't even show the Acer splash screen, can't get into BIOS.  If you listen closely you can hear the fans power down after 20 seconds or so, then the smaller of the two fans (left side if you're looking down at the keyboard) will spin up and down over and over, I just hear a short little *whirrrr* sound then it spins down, then back up, etc...  Don't know if that means anything, could just be the fan reacting to a tiny amount of heat from the vid card. 

 

What I've done. 

 

1.  Did the power reset thing with the pin hole on the bottom.  Nothing.

 

2.  Popped the keyboard up and disconnected the battery entirely.  No change.

 

First time I did this was a few months back, but after a couple tries it booted up.  It doesn't get restarted very often, but it seemed like every time it took a bit longer to get it to boot.  This time I don't think it's coming back.  When it was running it ran great.  Played games, it didn't run hot at all, no problems.  I never had it crash while running, just this boot issue. 

 

It's one of the early V17 Nitros, came with Windows 8.1 64 bit.  I hadn't yet upgraded it to 10.  My gut feeling is a bad BIOS.  Or the Motherboard itself.  But I'm posting here to see if there are any other suggestions, people who had the same issue, or whatever.

 

On a side note this will likely be my last Acer thanks to them telling me to "wait and see" after the initial call when it was in warranty, and now they refuse to do anything since it's now out of warranty.  Thanks Acer, that's great. 

Answers

  • xlolxapplex
    xlolxapplex Member Posts: 4 New User

    Had this issue with another laptop. Reseating the RAM fixed it. Try reseating your ram.

  • ksredman
    ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User

    Well that was annoying, have to pop the motherboard out to get to the RAM.  Anyway, reseated the RAM, no change.  I should have thought of that though. 

     

    I do have two RAM modules, tomorrow I'll try removing one of them at a time and see what happens.  I may take them into the local PC repair place and see if they can test them.  If they check out I guess I'm down to the motherboard being bad.

  • ksredman
    ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User

    Ok, I tried it a second time and it booted.  Not sure what to think about that, it didn't boot the first try after reseating the RAM. 

     

    Now I'm afraid to shut it down again.  I might check the BIOS version and update it if needed, see if that does anything. 

  • ksredman
    ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User

    Yeah, looks like I have an expensive paperweight. 

     

    At least I got it up long enough to pull any files I wanted off it.  Tried to update the BIOS, not even sure if that succeeded or not as it automatically restarted, and now I'm back in the same boat.  Blank screen, no boot. 

     

    Any other ideas, short of replacing the motherboard?

  • xlolxapplex
    xlolxapplex Member Posts: 4 New User

    Could be a heat issue. Try blowing out dust with compressed air. You can also try pulling out the CMOS battery and the laptop battery and let it completely die and then put the batteries back in and try again. Or maybe replace the CMOS battery.

  • ksredman
    ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User

    I had blown dust out of the fans already. 

     

    I tried removing the CMOS battery and let it sit overnight.  Still won't boot.

     

    I discovered that my old laptop also has DDR3 memory, so I put that RAM in.  It wasn't the same speed, 1333 in the old vs. 1600 in the new, but that shouldn't matter.  Didn't work.

     

    Then I disconnected things.  The connecters across the bottom of the board, wireless adapter, battery pack, keyboard, pulled out the DVD drive, disconnected the hard drives.  Just stripped it down to the bare minimum.  Wasn't going to boot that way of course, just wanted to see if I could get a splash screen, error message, anything.  But no, just the same blank screen. 

     

    Only thing I haven't tried is replacing the CMOS battery, but a dead battery shouldn't keep it from posting. 

     

    I don't believe it's a heat issue.  The fans are working, and not squealing or anything.  When it was running I played plenty of games on it and it never crashed during heavy GPU useage.  That, and this issue persists even though it's been powered down for days now.  After observing it with the keyboard removed I think the fan behavior I talked about in the first post is normal.  They spin up, and then shut off for a little bit.  As the board heats up they come back on, but don't stay on very long because there's no real load on the system and it doesn't take much to keep it cool.  I can put a finger on the motherboard right over the CPU/GPU area and it's warm but not hot. 

  • ym1
    ym1 Member Posts: 2 New User

    As I have exactly the same problem now, I would like to know if you finally found the solution.

     

    Thanks in advance.

  • KenshiroGT
    KenshiroGT Member Posts: 4 New User
    I can confirm that I have the same problem. Did you manage to find a solution?
  • ksredman
    ksredman Member Posts: 6 New User

    Sadly no, never did get it working.  My laptop is now sitting in pieces in my office. 

     

    After swapping out all sorts of parts the only thing I'm left with is the motherboard itself.  The fix I haven't tried yet is reballing the motherboard, which is risky and involves baking it in an oven.  The idea is to heat the solder connections just enough so they fix any small cracks that might be shorting things out.  It's certainly possible to destroy the motherboard, but mine is DOA anyway so I'm going to try it.

     

    Not happy at all with the barely 1 year I got out of this rather expensive laptop.  Even though I had called Acer support about this when it was under warranty they would do nothing since it didn't totally die until a few weeks after the 1 year mark.  I don't know that any of the other manufacturers are better, but I won't be buying another Acer. 

  • KenshiroGT
    KenshiroGT Member Posts: 4 New User
    Realy sorry for your laptop looks like the same problem as mine. But before you do anything further with the motherboard have a look at this link http://diy.viktak.com/2014/07/how-to-recover-laptop-after-failed-bios.html?m=1
    It's about flashing the bios directly into the eeprom. might be interesting. I'm going to give it a try and I will post the result.
  • ym1
    ym1 Member Posts: 2 New User

    Just for info, I finally sent my laptop (under guarantee), and it was repaired free of charges in 1 week (in Switzerland).

    The system had been changed, so I had to recover a previous version to get the version I had before sending.

  • KenshiroGT
    KenshiroGT Member Posts: 4 New User
    I have just fixed it myself using flash eeprom method (SPI PROGRAM). Just follow the tutorial in my previous post. Went into another problem: the size of the bios downloaded from acer site -unlike the other marks-(.fd file) is bigger than the ship capacity (8mb) so I searched till I found how to cut the bios rom (.bin file) using hex editor. Once done my laptop did post and boot. Now what a relief and thanks to my personal effort and the help of users only. Last acer product I buy.
    Those who need the bios .bin file PM or email me.
  • Goalbasher
    Goalbasher Member Posts: 1 New User
    I bought my acer aspire v17 nitro black edition in 2014 I started having trouble with screen not coming on for long periods of time after cold booting laptop. Replaced battery since the old one wasn't good anyway. Did everything I can think of including turning off all screen savers and power saving functions. This problem seems to be at the bios level. If I leave it on, then after a while about an hour the screen turns on. It seems to be taking longer each time I ave to cold boot or do a ctl alt del boot. No help from Acer. Any other new info would be of great help. Thanks. 

Categories