Hiya…parents have come up for Christmas and have bought their laptop with them as it’s not working. In their words “it won’t start” and that’s about all I’ve got out of them about why it won’t work….

It’s a few yrs old Acer running Vista (I think). I tried turning it on & it gave me the ‘windows did not start properly, do you want to load windows normally or open in safe mode’ option screen. I wanted to see what happened when I tried to load it normally, so selected that…It loaded the boot screen then went through to loading windows, then just hung with a black screen. No progress, no errors, nothing.

I turned it off & tried turning it back on again, thinking this time I’d select Safe Mode, but now all that happens is the power switch lights green for a few seconds before the whole thing turns off, it then turns back on again for a couple of seconds, turns off, turns on, repeatedly……
It doesn’t even load BIOS, so won’t get anywhere. I can’t do anything with it.

I’ve taken the HDD out & tried booting – no good.
I have taken the battery out & tried booting – no good.
I would like to check whether the RAM has become unseated from the mother board, but don’t have a small enough screwdriver to get the cover off.
I downloaded a copy of Puppy Linux, which I stuck on a disc & tried to boot from, but it doesn’t even get far enough for that. It just does the on/off power cycling……

Any thoughts……..? I’ve looked on various forums & there’s a variety of reasons mentioned, including fubared motherboard, knackered battery, bad HDD……

I am pretty sure it’s not the battery as it does it with the battery removed (plugged into mains).

I have read that some laptops won’t load BIOS if the HDD is fubared, as it needs to check that first….? So, that being true, it could be the HDD?
Or it could be the motherboard??

Not sure how I can tell now…..

My other half has a Dell that she never uses anymore. I might take the HDD out of that and try it in this laptop to see what happens…..

Any ideas……….?

Oh, and the back-up drive I bought my Dad for Christmas is now looking like a) a crap present and b) a few days late!!

BALLS…….

not what you want to hear, but I have literally just this week finished rebuilding/reviving my local barmaid’s Acer laptop.

She had had some intermittent software and OS failures on it by the time it got to me, at which point it put it’s four little PC paws in the air and cried it’s death rattle.

Ive run some utils on the HDD and it’s borked. Corruptions, lost sectors and general physical crapness in both the Primary partition and in the recovery partition. But Im still not sure whether it’s a physical problem or a physical induced virus problem. She has young sons with a propensity for warez sites.

to make things worse, being a laptop, the COA code on the shitty sticker on the bottom of the computer had worn off.

Fortunately my Bro sorted me out with a legit XP COA to rebuild and I had spare HDD lying around for rebuilding another, less attractive friend’s laptop, but Ive found that AMD never produced XP drivers for this VGA controller, gaggghhhhhhh! SO its running a base driver, badly. WIll have to get a Vista build on there in the new year.

SO Stoner’s TIP OF THE DAY: FFS right down your COAs for laptop OS, because microsoft changed their printing tech a few years back and now they rub off and once gone, theyre gone – acer WILL NOT reissue a COA for a rebuild.

Sounds like a couple of problems:

I tried turning it on & it gave me the ‘windows did not start properly, do you want to load windows normally or open in safe mode’ option screen. I wanted to see what happened when I tried to load it normally, so selected that…It loaded the boot screen then went through to loading windows, then just hung with a black screen. No progress, no errors, nothing.

Corrupt windows installation or a knackered hard drive.
Corrupt windows is possibly repairable with a windows boot disk but usually needs a full reinstall.

now all that happens is the power switch lights green for a few seconds before the whole thing turns off, it then turns back on again for a couple of seconds, turns off, turns on, repeatedly……

Sounds like a dead battery or if you have it running off the mains then the plug, lead, fuse or connection point where you plug the lead might be knackered and the laptop isnt getting charged up. There should be a light on the laptop to indicate when you have the power lead plugged in – does this come on/off when you plug/unplug the lead. If not try wiggling the lead around, changing the plug fuse etc

Heat would be my guess; probably full of fluff. If you leave it an hour or two and try again, does it fire up past BIOS?

Cheers, Stoner! Checked the code on the bottom & it’s still there! Which is something, I s’pose.

I think I will try the hdd from my other half’s Dell. If it boots, then i’ll just get a new drive for it, stick the old one in a caddy to get what I can off it.
If it still doesn’t boot, then I guess i’ll stick the drive in a caddy & make a call on whether it’s worth sorting this laptop out or just getting a new one…

Cougar – was going to try it in a bit & see how far it gets….I did wonder if it was heat…

mdavids my first thought was knackered hdd. Weird that it initially booted a certain extent, but the second & subsequent times it wouldn’t even load the BIOS…

Will check the lead in a bit, but it does the same thing with the battery removed & the lead only plugged in. I think it has constant power as I wouldn’t expect it to turn on & off constantly, rather come on, then off & stay off….
But, I will check that too in a bit. I have an Acer laptop too, so I will see if the power adaptor is the same & try with that…

Cheers!