Laptop no longer booting from HDD or recovery USB

Hello everyone,

My Acer Aspire V3 is refusing to boot to W10 after I forced shutdown when it froze whilst running some large video conversions. I have tried the following:

• Normal reboot results in the Preparing Automatic Repair on the Acer loading for a few seconds after which the screen goes blank with nothing further.
• The W10 recovery flash drive I made from the same installation a while ago doesn't boot in UEFI. In legacy it goes as far as the screen with the blue W10 logo before going blank with nothing further.
• I used HBCD v15 (running on a flash drive made using Rufus) to go into mini XP and try to run chkdsk, but my HDD isn't detected in the disk manager there.
• Parted Magic on HBCD does show my HDD and I can browse the files there, but as far as I'm aware, it's Linux and can't do chkdsk.
• None of the DOS based programmes on HBCD load because of a High Memory Area error, so I can't try any of the tools there.

Frankly, without a BSOD or any error message, I really don't know where to go from here. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much for your swift reply. My other device is a mac and I'm not sure if it would create the bootable USB correctly. I'll give it a go, else I'll try to borrow someone's PC for a few minutes.

Thank you for pointing this out.

spunk said:

Create a new Windows installer using Rufus. Under Partition Scheme, choose GPT partition Scheme for UEFI. or use the Media Creation Toolhttps://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-bootable-media-uefi-support

Im sure it was the Media Creation Tool I used to create the recovery disk...it was a while ago. I used Rufus for HBCD and probably selected the wrong partition scheme.

I'll try what you've suggested. Thank you.

CountMike said:

That might not help in case HDD is damaged which seems to be the case. Disk could be checked from Hyhi's utility.

Unfortunately i fear you may be right.

I'm not familiar with PartedMagic but came across GSmartControl which had some tests I could run. It says there was a read failure after completing 10%.

Not sure what to do with this information. I'll wait till I create the disk you suggested.

CountMike said:

Hi and welcome to TF.
Maybe you could use this Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk - Windows 10 Forums if you have access to another computer.

I'm not having any luck booting from this. It was written with Rufus using GPT and I've disabled secureboot on my laptop as I read sometimes this interferes with booting from external media. Still won't boot.

The recovery tools can't be written using MBR for legacy boot according to Rufus, so I'm a bit stumped...

1) perform a power reset:
How to do a "hard reset" on many laptops - Lenovo Community
2) find 3 flash drives that you can format (> or = 8 GB )
3) Create a brand new bootable Windows 10 iso
Download Windows 10
4) Create a bootable Memtest86+ version 5.01 flash drive:
Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool
5) Create a bootable Ubuntu/Linux flash drive:
Create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu tutorials


Boot from USB Drive on Windows 10 PC Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials:
Boot from USB Drive on Windows 10 PC Windows 10 Tutorials

Note
If you have fast boot or ultra fast boot enabled in your UEFI firmware settings, then you will need to temporarily disable fast boot or ultra fast boot to be able to boot from a USB.
How to Enable Fast Boot or Ultra Fast Boot in UEFI Firmware Settings for Windows:
Enable or Disable Fast Boot in UEFI Firmware Settings for Windows Windows 10 Tutorials

1. Try another USB stick
2. Try all USB ports (2.0 and 3.0)
3. Maybe when using UEFI Bios you have to temporarily switch to Legacy in BIOS settings
4. Turn off temporarily fast boot, secure boot, CSM if enabled