Issues booting Acer laptop

mikearmstrong

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Hi, I have an Acer Travelmate p253 laptop running Windows 10 that has all of a sudden bricked on me. It was working absolutely fine until the other day when I went to do something on it and it was being really slow, would not open programs, wouldn't even open the start menu. I had to hard reset (holding down the power button) and when it booted back up I had to do a disk check. I did this and it was seemingly fine for the few hours after that I used it.

I then went on it the next day and it was being extremely sluggish again. I tried to restart it but it got stuck on the restart screen for an extremely long time and again, I had to hard reset. Since then I have not been able to get on my laptop at all. It gets to the Acer screen but cannot get past there. I can get into BIOS and the boot-loader-menu but that's about it. It simply tries to come on for a long time but comes up with a crash report and restarts before doing this again then attempts an automatic repair. It then seemingly goes to the automatic repair screen but I am met with a blank screen and nothing happens.

After looking online, I found that I can put the Windows 10 recovery files onto a USB drive, boot from that and then access the safe-mode, troubleshooting and repairs. So I made one of these drives, told the computer to boot from it and to no surprise of mine, it didn't help my cause whatsoever. I am pretty certain that it is booting from the device as I have set it as the first boot device and it goes to a different Acer screen before doing a similar thing to the automatic repair and taking me to a blank screen.

So currently I am struggling to work out what I can do. I can't access automatic repair, I can't boot to the files that allow me to repair my system otherwise, I can't even do a factory reset. So if someone has any idea of what to do, that would be very much appreciated.

Extra information:
-I did a Windows 10 update on the day this all happened so the issue could be a corrupted Windows, although the laptop worked fine for hours after before having any issues
-My laptop was idle when all of this occurred, it had been sitting on the desktop with no applications running for quite a while before this happened.
-After the disk check that I had to do, it was running fine for the rest of the night (from what I remember).
 
This could be hard to diagnose over the internet but it could be that the hard drive has died. How old is the computer. You could make a linux boot USB drive if you have access to another computer and if your computer boots from that then it is, almost, certain to be your hard drive. You may have already done this, if so apologies. but if you do manage to get into your computer again then a backup of all your personal files would be thefirst thing to do.
 
This could be hard to diagnose over the internet but it could be that the hard drive has died. How old is the computer. You could make a linux boot USB drive if you have access to another computer and if your computer boots from that then it is, almost, certain to be your hard drive. You may have already done this, if so apologies. but if you do manage to get into your computer again then a backup of all your personal files would be thefirst thing to do.

Thanks for the reply, yeah I had a feeling it was either something to do with Windows or the disc that it was on, since it did that check and then was suspiciously slow. Yeah that might be a good idea I'll give that a go, I can make a Linux boot USB. If I manage to get onto my system with a Linux boot drive then will I be able to access my old files just on a different operating system? Sorry if that's a dumb question I should know that sort of thing but I've never used Linux before so I'm not sure if it'll be the same. I assume that since it's booting from a different drive that I won't have my files either? But yeah if I get on again the first thing I am doing is backing up all my files.
 
Yes if you can boot in with a Linux USB drive then you should be able to transfer your files across to another USB drive assuming that your hard drive is readable. Obviously unless you have the appropriate programs installed (which you wont have in linux) you will not be able to read the files.

If your not familiar with Linux I would suggest you use Linux Mint or Xubuntu as, in my experience, these are the easiest to use. Not all Linux distros will work with all computers so you may have to try different distros. There are lots to try though. No doubt others will recomend other distros and they are equally valid.
 
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Yes if you can boot in with a Linux USB drive then you should be able to transfer your files across to another USB drive assuming that your hard drive is readable. Obviously unless you have the appropriate programs installed (which you wont have in linux) you will not be able to read the files.

If your not familiar with Linux I would suggest you use Linux Mint or Xubuntu as, in my experience, these are the easiest to use. Not all Linux distros will work with all computers so you may have to try different distros. There are lots to try though. No doubt others will recomend other distros and they are equally valid.

Okay thanks, yeah I don't mind too much about not being able to open them it's just that I want to get my files back if possible, if I can do that then I will probably do a clean Windows install from there.

Thanks for the recommendations on which versions of Linux to look at, I'll try them out.
 
I made a Linux USB and I can boot from it successfully, so I assume the issue is with my hard drive? But I can access my old files so that's good but that makes me unsure if the issue really is my hard drive. My plan is to copy any files I need before doing a clean install of Windows but I want to see if there's anything else I can do first to prevent doing that.

Any suggestions on checks I should do that might be able to show me what the issues are?
 
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