To boot or not to boot?

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Hello. Can I bother somebody here with my strange peculiar problem ? I use an Acer M1610 that has given stellar service in the last 5 years. Now, it is reluctant to boot. It goes through the BIOS thing, the 5 dots go around 3 times then stops. When I kill the machine, ON switch for 5 seconds, I can see the lock screen flash on the monitor.
Solution : I open up the case, remove anything at all, be it the graphic card, a RAM stick, the power and data to the HD then reconnect it and it will boot to completion. Strange, is it not ? I found out that if I killed the power bar to kill it, when I reapplied power it would boot, not very recommended as a procedure but it worked. Lately, I have hibernated the machine and that also is fine, a touch of the PW will bring it out of hibernation.
I have changed all that I could think of in the BIOS and also used the BIOS default settings, NOGO. I have a new HD in it, 4 new RAM sticks and I swapped three graphic cards so far, still NOGO. It runs W-8.1 fine when it will boot.
I am at a loss for a solution, can anybody light my candle ? All best wishes. Jean.

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Either power supply or motherboard is all that is left. I’d try the power supply first – you should be able to check the voltages in the BIOS to confirm it’s an issue.

cheers, Paul

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Many thanks, Paul, for your time. I respect your knowledge but I doubt that your two solutions would cure this aggravation. I have a feeling that there is a step somewhere that is missing as it will more or less boot to the lock screen but stops there. I can see the lock screen flash on momentarily when I “kill” the machine, so it booted to this point. What I will try next and obviously will report back to you, is the graphic card. I will remove it an boot to the on-board video. I think that this card, a 16x, is kept live when on hibernation thus the problem is nonextant. I will not get a fine screen resolution but what the heck, I can get it going again, I hope.

All best wishes. Jean.

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Have a look at some of these:
Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Third Edition – PDF Now Available

39512-Boot-failure-troubleshooter

Some of the above charts in the link look very useful.

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Thanks, Clint, I followed all the pertinent flow-charts and ended up always at a dead-end. But very interesting, thanks.

Paul, this is plumb crazy. I got a revised driver for this graphic card from the ATI site, installed it and voilà, no reboot after the install. Now the crazy part : I opened up the case and pulled the logic and power cables from the D: optical device and tried booting, Nada ! I reconnected both cables and voilà, it boots. Crazy enough for you ? I just can not make any rime or reason to this strange behaviour. No cure as yet but I have found the solution in hibernation. I should stop while I am ahead ? All best wishes. Jean.

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Do you have the CD/DVD and the HDD on the same controller? Check the disk arrangement in the BIOS.
Removing disk one when disk 2 is the designated boot drive will result in failure because disk 2 is now seen as disk 1 and Windows is very fussy about disk location.

cheers, Paul

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Hello, Paul. Can I bring in another indication and confuse you as much as I am confused ? OK, here : when the machine will not boot past the locked screen as noted above, ( it is not seen, just a flash ), if I then use a USB key with the proper start items, it does start as required and normal. Does this help you understand where the bone would be ? If it boots this way the BIOS ought to be properly initialized, no ?

I certainly hope that you are not loosing any sleep over this, it is peculiar and I can work around. I am still curious as to why it behaves this way.
All best wishes. Jean.

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Are you booting from the USB?
Have you reset the BIOS? Sometimes helps.
Read the SMART on the disk to check for issues. I use CrystalDiskInfo.
It sounds like a hardware issue but it’s hard to tell at a distance.

cheers, Paul

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Paul, greets.
Yes, yes and yes. I have a feeling that this is due to the graphic card as it stops on it when first accessed by the boot process, it is ready to show the lock-screen but stops there. Go search.
I any other boot mode, ie : in hibernation or in a full power OFF. it must keep that card alive and then process along the booting sequence, a non-educated guess here, just looking at what goes on.
This machine is on W-8.1, I will try to go to 9926 and see if this repeats, I never saw this in W-7 or prior OSes.
You are relieved of any participation in this subject, it is now between me and that Acer.
All best wishes. Jean

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Jean:

I had a computer once which had serious issues — it was super slow, and speedfan showed that it was running super hot. Turned out to be a bad video card. When I got rid of the bad video card, the problem was solved.

Jim

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Thanks, Jim. I have tried three different Vidcards in this machine all gave the same results. Maybe the driver is at fault ? I went to the ATI site and D/L’d a recent one but there was no change.
All best wishes. Jean.

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I take it that one of the first avenues you explored was to replace the CMOS battery ?

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Ginger, greets.
How can this cure my problem ? If the date and time are right, the CMOS cell is still good. I fancy ! Jean.

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Hi,

Although this does sound like a hardware problem, have you considered that it could be an OS boot fault?

At the start of the thread you said that it pauses ‘after the five dots go around three times’ – so I’m assuming we are talking Windows8 or 8.1. If that is the case, I’ve seen quite a few broken booted Win8 Acers over the last few months. The start-up repair options usually fail to correct the boot fault, even if you attempt it several times, but a total re-install (rather than a non-destructive reset) invariably cures the problem completely.

Here’s one easy hardware test to try before you consider going down the onerous re-install trail.
Download Linux Mint17 live demo and burn it to an iso DVD.
Set the Acer BIOS boot order to boot the DVD drive before the HD.
Shut the system down completely and cold boot from the Linux live demo disk.
The Linux live disk demo runs totally in RAM so if the Linux desktop finally appears you’ve almost certainly ruled out a RAM fault.
If the Linux demo works ok then that’s a good indication that the graphics card and everything else, other than the HD, is working ok – Out of the box Linux uses generic drivers that, although not as finely tuned as specific drivers, generally work well enough to prove the hardware is OK.

Just make sure you don’t click the Install icon on the Linux demo desktop or you could find, after a few more key stroke options, that you are about to replace Windows with Linux on your HD!
Although that would be no bad thing as you’re using Win8.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2713 scroll down the page to see the list of download mirrors – get the 32bit version to avoid hardware complications. The Mint MATE desktop version is probably easier to get on with than the Cinnamon desktop version if you are new to Linux.

Canadian download link for the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE iso:
http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/linuxmint//stable/17.1/linuxmint-17.1-mate-32bit.iso

Hope this may help to sort the wood from the trees.

Cheers, Chris

P.S. If you need a simple iso burner, BurnCDCC is brilliant (wait for the Save box to appear):
http://www.softpedia.com/dyn-postdownload.php/41b5ce5b512ecfdfbbaa91d30c813acf/54f187a7/ae23/0/1

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Hello again, Chris.
A most heartfelt thankyou from Montreal. I did as you suggested and all is in oil. This Mint is quite nice but there is an education involved. I did not click on anything not familiar and then found the “Quit” button. It ran perfectly ! It even gave me my high resolution of 1920 x 1080. The trees are still standing though. Even if it ran as expected, all my hardware are proven good. I have tried three HDs on this machine and after their trials, they again ran smoothly in another machine, ie: the problem is not the HD, nor any of the rest of the devices.
Could this be an incompatibility between W-8.1 and the graphic card here ? The RAM is new, the HD was changed, the graphic card also was replaced. I guess that I will have to live with this annoying bug, the machine is fully usable when I succeed in getting it to boot. My saviour is an USB device loaded with repair files.
Thanks for the education, Chris, in spite of not being able to pin down the problem. Mint is nice but I am not yet ready to leave Windows.

All good wishes.

Edit :

NB: There was a funny after Mint, Chris. Some of the URLs that I patronize would not connect. I shut down completely and rebooted with the help of that USB device and after, it recognized all my URLs. I am on Gmail as if this means anything. I guess that there were a few particles left after Mint was closed. A FWIW ! I knew how to get out of it. Be good. Jean.

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Hello, Chris, across the pound. What a fine reply, thank you. I will attend to it tomorrow.

I have tried Linux before and I still use it at times eg: Gparted. I quit Unix and such as I could not get the drivers for most of my devices as Windows 7, then, could. The question machine is on 8.1 and runs quite nicely save the booting. I got two run-arounds to boot it but I am still curious as regard this aggravation. I keep it on Hibernation, good ! I also got a second drastic run-around, it was a total shock to the machine, I would throw the power switch to kill it but in spite of this horrible treatment, it would boot. Really beyond me to understand the machine logic.

Never mind the wood from the trees, I have a couple of chainsaws ready !

NB: my Acer is 64 bitness.

As Churchill was wont to say, all best wishes. Jean.

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rebooted with the help of that USB device

??:confused:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Hi Jean,

Sorry for the delay in responding but I’ve been away from home for a few days.

As to some of your urls being broken, I can’t see any mechanism for that to have been caused by the Mint Live Demo – it runs solely in RAM and does not involve the HD at all. I’ve noticed that both Chrome and Firefox have suddenly become very picky about system time – I had a laptop in last week where many of the bookmarks, including Google, appeared broken. In passing, I noticed that the system time was ten minutes slow. On correction the browsers allowed connection to everything. Must be a tightening of the HTTPS requirements I guess.

You say the RAM is new – I had a surprising recent experience where some Crucial recommended RAM caused numerous booting problems on an upmarket AMD based machine. Crucial, as ever, replaced the RAM without question but the faults remained. Replaced with similar spec Corsair modules and it runs a treat.

If your graphics card manufacturer provides Win8.1 drivers then you’d have expected them to have tested them on Win8.1 so I doubt the model is incompatible. Nevertheless it could still have some partial build fault – Mint may just have been less demanding of it than Win8.1

You say it can’t be the HD so I assume the other drives you’ve tried were installed with Win8.1 and still threw up the same freezing boot error. So we’re running out of culprits – except Win8 itself.

Interestingly, I came back yesterday to find someone had bought in a non-booting Win8.1 Acer laptop. This is the third time this Acer has been in over the last few months, each time displaying different faults. First time, the curser kept jumping back to the start of the line as you typed. Second time, if you clicked on any item on the desktop or in a folder it open the first item rather than the one you’d clicked. Absolutely nuts! This time it was just freezing when the desktop loaded. This turned out to be that Avast antivirus was pulling 95% of the CPU. Never seen Avast do that before but re-installing it cured the problem. The relevance to yours is that having cured the CPU overload fault it would occasionally freeze on start-up – even before the balls started to revolve. In this case, simply touching any key broke the freeze and it then carried on to boot normally. Unfortunately I didn’t get chance to explore this further as, having solved the main fault, the lady needed her laptop tout suite and said she would bring it back some other time. My first thought is that this may be some ‘Pause on Error’ fault in the Uefi (the successor to the BIOS).

Regarding your comment that switching off at the power switch forces a boot. Although doing so is a recipe for disaster, particularly for the hard drive, you are most likely simply discharging all the system’s capacitors – in the same way that removing the battery from a laptop and holding the power button down for 30 seconds can often kick a frozen boot into life – as it also did on the Acer I’ve just done.

Having turned this into War and Peace, yet again, I’ll wrap up by saying I find it interesting that all these weird Win8 symptoms, particularly booting and auto-repair, can be instantly and permanently solved if the client allows me to: change the Uefi to Legacy BIOS (thereby switching off secure boot), reformat the drive to MBR instead of GPT and then install Win7. Controversial, I know, but it is a fact.

There is nothing whatsoever secure about Secure Boot – I’ve never seen so many seriously infected systems. My personal view is that Secure Boot’s real function is to prevent non-technical user from installing Linux which, following the general Win8 debacle and the runaway success of Android, Microsoft are now running scared of. Why else would Microsoft be giving Win10 away for free, if not to try to regain their reputation before getting swept away by the competition? Sad to see.

Not sure if any of this helps you solve your problem but at least I got it all off my chest!

Cheers, Chris

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Chris, a large thankyou for this last post of yours. I just read it corner to corner and will get back to you in jiffy or two. Busy even if retired for the last 22 years. Be good. Jean.

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Good morning, Chris.
My turn to apologize for being tardy, life of a retiree can be and is hectic. Thanks a couple of megas for your note. In the mean time, let me state that W-8.1 is not the culprit, my Acer is now running 9926 and doing great, save again the locked booting. You mentioned that I should look for an up-to-date Vidcard driver. I did, on the AMD site and I had the latest. This is a dated Vidcard and I do not think that AMD has followed suite in this regard. My loss !
I was also amazed to see that a major kill of the machine caused nothing worse and even cured this non-boot, I hesitated before OFFing the power bar, it came back ON live. Go search. ( As a small note, the CPU is quiet, runs at 10% to 4% ) ( The RAM usage shows 1 MBs as reserved to hardware, I presume that it goes to the Vidcard. )
Yes, I had trouble shot the RAM sticks, the HDs and all that I could think of, no joy, they all behaved fine in another machine. Really strange. I am still confident that the Vidcard is the culprit, seeing as I can cure the problem sans too much ado, I can live with it, not cricket but manageable.
I see that another reader has appreciated your dithyrambic prose, as much as I do, that is the spirit of this thread. I will keep trying to pin down this small annoyance and post back to you on any further progress.

Further investigation confirmed this Vidcard as being the culprit. I got the box opened and re-installed the onboard video, it ran fine on three restarts from shutdown. It only gave me 1280 x 1024 that is useable on my monitor but not optimum. Back on the culprit card and it would not boot, therefore I used the USB startup key and I am back at 1920 x 1080 . . . nice !

In the mean time, at the SW end of the UK, have a great day. Jean.

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