87GT Posted February 2, 2016 Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 So I have an Acer e5-511 laptop that I reinstalled windows 10 on yesterday. That worked fine. I installed all the needed custom apps and all the windows updates. I rebooted and it went to the desktop without a problem. I shut it down and went to bed. Today when I turn it on it says No Bootable device. I am guessing the Hard Drive MBR is corrupted after I shut it down. No big deal I go into BIOS and it can see there is a hard drive there. I setup the boot order to boot from the physical hard drive last. CD-ROM and USB are at the top. I put in my trusty Hiren's boot disk CD but it refuses to see it and tries the HD and fails. I go back into BIOS and there is an option F12 for boot menu that I enable. I reboot and go into the boot menu but it sees nothing not even the HD. Okay so I make a bootable USB Hiren's stick. Reboot F12 it doesn't see either the USB, CD, or HD. I try my Windows 10 CD and it does boot from that. I try the Win10 repair option but it doesn't see the hard drive. Same deal if I try to just reinstall windows 10. At this point I am puzzled so I take apart the case to get to the hard drive. I made sure the tiny ass ribbon cables are connected to the motherboard. Put it all back together and no dice. Just to rule out bad media I test booting my USB and the CD on another desktop and that works fine. What is wrong with this laptop? Did the HD die and also something with the motherboard not booting to other storage options? Any other ideas I should check? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forrest Gump 9 Posted February 2, 2016 Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 Whenever I have any small electronic problem I just put it in microwave for thirty seconds that usually solved it. You aughta try that sometime. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 2, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 Whenever I have any small electronic problem I just put it in microwave for thirty seconds that usually solved it. You aughta try that sometime. That only works on metal pots and pans. You AUGHTA try that sometime. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unfunnyryan Posted February 2, 2016 Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 toss the HD to an external reader on another machine and see if it reads? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grudes Posted February 2, 2016 Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 Yea sounds like your hard drive died, but the fact that it wont read any other device makes me suspicous of your motherboard being bad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 3, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 3, 2016 HD won't work in external drive. I made a bootable Linux USB stick and it also won't boot. I bought this last Christmas. Do acers only last a year ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1Quik7 Posted February 3, 2016 Report Share Posted February 3, 2016 Are you doing the troubleshooting with the battery out of the laptop? Have you tried booting the Legacy BIOS? Not super familiar with Windows 10. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 3, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 3, 2016 Are you doing the troubleshooting with the battery out of the laptop? Have you tried booting the Legacy BIOS? Not super familiar with Windows 10. Yes and Yes. With the Hard drive not even connected it won't boot from USB, dos or linux. I think I am just fucked. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Second Gen Posted February 4, 2016 Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 Agreed sounds like you lost the system board. suggest going into the Bios and reset to factory settings as this might reset something that the update process may have caused. If not its time to buy the Surface Pro listed on CR for $400 buckaroos. = Shameless plug for someone on CR I do not know : ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mojoe Posted February 4, 2016 Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 I bought this last Christmas. Do acers only last a year ? Any chance you got it with Amazon Prime? We sent a laptop back after having it a long time and it crapped out. Got a full refund. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 4, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 Any chance you got it with Amazon Prime? We sent a laptop back after having it a long time and it crapped out. Got a full refund. No I bought it at Target. Not sure what their return policy is on something so old. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShowHBK Posted February 4, 2016 Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 Sorry for the late buzz in... 87GT: When you try and boot, do you get a blue screen that says "your system needs to be repaired" with a little sad face on it? The reason I ask is because (strangely enough) I had a similar problem with my system just recently where my SSD was the problem, not the Motherboard. Let me know if at any point during your problems you have received such a message and I can follow up with the steps I took to fix things. I would be slow to call this a bad MB. let me know the details and I would be happy to help. Most of the time if a MB is bad then the system will not POST at all (not in every case, but most). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 4, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 Sorry for the late buzz in... 87GT: When you try and boot, do you get a blue screen that says "your system needs to be repaired" with a little sad face on it? The reason I ask is because (strangely enough) I had a similar problem with my system just recently where my SSD was the problem, not the Motherboard. Let me know if at any point during your problems you have received such a message and I can follow up with the steps I took to fix things. I would be slow to call this a bad MB. let me know the details and I would be happy to help. Most of the time if a MB is bad then the system will not POST at all (not in every case, but most). No it is a picture of a hard drive with a magnifying glass that says "no bootable devices" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShowHBK Posted February 4, 2016 Report Share Posted February 4, 2016 No it is a picture of a hard drive with a magnifying glass that says "no bootable devices" My 2 cents: 1. Try and fix the UEFI boot settings back to default values. After starting your system press F2 to get to the BIOS, then (if memory serves me correct) hit F9 to load up the default values. head over to the "Boot Devices" tab and ensure that the HD your OS is on is showing up and put it at the top of the list using "page up" and "page down" to switch the values. Not working still? 2. Try and press ALT + F10 with the default HD in the system. This should launch Acer Recovery software. Which might boot so that you can run a repair. I am not 100% sure if this will work, but it was never mentioned so worth a try in my book. 3. Last resort: Here is a link to Acer's official site which runs you through how to create your own recovery media on a DVD or USB. http://community.acer.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Windows-10-Installation-Recovery-Media-Creation-and-Use/ta-p/394236 In my opinion, something in your system is not pointing to the correct HD. This happened to me when I switched out my HD and had to reinstall Windows 10. The system simply would not accept that the new HD was the correct boot drive and wanted something different. I ended up having to reset my UEFI boot settings and my BIOS altogether and reconfigure the boot order. I hope this helps. Let me know if it continues to give you trouble man, I would be more then happy to offer any assistance I can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tractor Posted February 5, 2016 Report Share Posted February 5, 2016 I've had several cases of windows 10's machines corrupting the MBR after updates and each time the auto repairs haven't worked for me and I end up using the windows 10 CD to get into DOS and running the BCDedit, diskpart, and other related commands to get the MBR back in shape. On the last one I did I even had an option to "disable anti-malware" in the boot options that I had to use in order to work on the MBR. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
87GT Posted February 8, 2016 Author Report Share Posted February 8, 2016 I've had several cases of windows 10's machines corrupting the MBR after updates and each time the auto repairs haven't worked for me and I end up using the windows 10 CD to get into DOS and running the BCDedit, diskpart, and other related commands to get the MBR back in shape. On the last one I did I even had an option to "disable anti-malware" in the boot options that I had to use in order to work on the MBR. It was the hard drive. After rebooting a few more times BIOS would not detect the drive. Swapped it out for a SSD and everything works now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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