[Deckster]

My 13 month old Acer laptop is frozen at the Acer splash screen. The only thing that it appears to do is when it indicates the press F2 to enter setup, it will respond to hitting F2 by showing entering setup but doesn't proceed.

It has been a week since I sent an email to Acer support and have not heard a thing. Anyone here have any ideas what the issue might be? I was hoping to have some idea of the problem before opening up the computer.

It is an Acer 8730 running Windows 7.

 

[BGY11]

Could be anything from bad RAM to something wrong with the motherboard.

I actually had a similar issue with my HP Elitebook a few months ago and the rep had me remove the AC adapter and battery, then hold down the power button for 30 seconds. Ever since doing that, the laptop has worked just fine. I had tried removing the battery and charger before, but it wasn't fixing the problem.

I believe this actually erased the CMOS (like removing the CMOS battery out of a desktop motherboard). Could be worth a shot with your laptop.

 

[Deckster]

Thanks for the tip, unfortunately it didn't work. I'll try taking out the RAM and re-installing to see if that helps. If not, I'll have to try sending another message to Acer

 

[DavidT]

Edit: Sorry, misread your post. Didn't see the setup wasn't actually loading.

 

[Deckster]

I can't access the bios. When I hit F2 the screen shows entering setup, but it just hangs there.

 

[Deckster]

Quick update

I finally got around to opening it up and playing (no rush since my iPad pretty much covered what I needed). Remove both RAM modules and swapped their sockets (no change), tried each individual RAM module in each socket by themselves (no change), so I conclude that either the RAM is good or both modules are toast (unlikely they would both fail at the same time). I then tried removing the HDD and boot up (with RAM re-installed) the system responds with allowing me into bios setup, or (if I let it) tries to boot up and says that there is no operating system present. Tried putting the HDD into the second drive bay and told bios to boot from there (back to original problem).

I think I've tried all the combinations I could and I'm pretty sure that the HDD is toast, not the RAM or IDE controllers. That being said, I have been looking at HDD and I am interested in a hybrid HDD/SSD. Does anyone have experience with them, and more importantly does anyone agree with me about a failed HDD based on my troubleshooting?

 

[vmpv]

your troubleshooting is sound. Looks like it's the hard drive causing the problem. Strange that it wouldn't finally give up looking for a hard drive and boot to setup. I've seen a few HP's that can take a minute or so to get into the setup with a wonky drive installed.

 

[Deckster]

thanks for verifying. I was expecting to pay a couple hundred dollars to replace the HDD and was pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive new 500G drives are. I've read really good reviews of the hybrid drives so I'm seriously considering that route.