Need help with an Acer Aspire 6920 cutting of and the restarting or freezing

[frenchscottie]

The customer brought in his laptop and says it keeps restarting and could I also upgrade Hard disk to a 1TB. Ok no problem so first I cloned the drive then did a chkdisk on it, all was ok. I turned on the laptop after opening up the back and discovered the fan wasn't spinning. Ok easy fix, ordered a fan and fitted it. It gets to windows 7 Pro and sits at the logon screen and then freezes or cuts off and restarts. I have swapped memory, removed keyboard, dvdrom, wireless card and battery and still the same. It will happily sit there without a problem booting from a Linux disk and running stress tests without a problem, but as soon as I boot from the HD it freezes. The laptop had a dedicated ATI graphics card and I don't have another one to test it with.
I even removed the new hard drive and put in a spare and attempted to install windows and it gets so far the freezes. All I can think of is it could be the memory on the ATI graphics card.

Anyone seen this before? Or have any more ideas.?

 

[coffee]

The customer brought in his laptop and says it keeps restarting and could I also upgrade Hard disk to a 1TB. Ok no problem so first I cloned the drive then did a chkdisk on it, all was ok. I turned on the laptop after opening up the back and discovered the fan wasn't spinning. Ok easy fix, ordered a fan and fitted it. It gets to windows 7 Pro and sits at the logon screen and then freezes or cuts off and restarts. I have swapped memory, removed keyboard, dvdrom, wireless card and battery and still the same. It will happily sit there without a problem booting from a Linux disk and running stress tests without a problem, but as soon as I boot from the HD it freezes. The laptop had a dedicated ATI graphics card and I don't have another one to test it with.
I even removed the new hard drive and put in a spare and attempted to install windows and it gettes so far the freezes. All I can think of is it could be the memory on the ATI graphics card.

Anyone seen this before? Or have any more ideas.?

You stated that it boots linux and runs fine. So, Why still thinking a hardware issue? This sounds software to me. Have you booted in safe mode to see if you still freeze? If you dont in safe mode, I would then start looking at 3rd party drivers that are loading at startup.

Did you find it at all interesting that you could run chkdsk on it and it would complete fine and not freeze up? This should tell you something.

coffee

 

[frenchscottie]

I ran chkdsk on the drive from my bench machine.
Forgot to say that it boots in safe mode without a problem.
I did say that I put a spare drive in and installed windows from scratch and it did the same, cut off then restarted about 40% then I tried again and it froze about 10%.
So hardware seems about the best answer I can come up with.
My thinking is that from safe mode or from Linux it's not fully using the gfx card memory etc.

 

[coffee]

I ran chkdsk on the drive from my bench machine.
Forgot to say that it boots in safe mode without a problem.
I did say that I put a spare drive in and installed windows from scratch and it did the same, cut off then restarted about 40% then I tried again and it froze about 10%.
So hardware seems about the best answer I can come up with.
My thinking is that from safe mode or from Linux it's not fully using the gfx card memory etc.

Thought in my mind is why you are concentrating on the video card. Could be other things causing this. Although if it runs fine in safe mode I would concentrate on a driver issue. Its true that video drivers are a main source of problems but perhaps if you change the video driver to the generic video driver and see if you are still having issues with it locking up. If thats the issue then it could just be a driver issue and a different version driver or some tweeking might fix this.

Let me know what you try

 

[frenchscottie]

Can you re-read my original post and you will see why I think it's not a driver issue.
The last sentence

 

[coffee]

Can you re-read my original post and you will see why I think it's not a driver issue.
The last sentence

Gotcha. Must have glossed over that point - sorry.

Can you give the model number for this laptop?

Since you said the fan was bad it might be a heat related damage to the video card. Thats as far as I can go without looking at the specific model.

 

[Koala]

I fixed a laptop with a similar issue a few weeks ago.

Run on Safe Mode and change the power options.

Device Manager -> Batteries -> Disable ACPI-Compliant

 

[Koala]

Oh wait, just seen your above post mentioning it did it on a spare drive -_-

 

[frenchscottie]

Gotcha. Must have glossed over that point - sorry.

Can you give the model number for this laptop?

Since you said the fan was bad it might be a heat related damage to the video card. Thats as far as I can go without looking at the specific model.

Sorry for delay in replying- been on holiday for a few days.
It's a Acer Aspire 6920G-6A3G25BN.
I ordered a refurb ATI radion Mobility HD3650 replacement card and installed it and it does the same, cuts off before getting to windows the restarting. If I boot to safe mode - no problem, works fine.
I uninstall the graphics driver again - after I had deleted it. Arrrgh. - and reboot and I think this is when I got a BSOD -
STOP 7E (0xFFFFFFFFE0000005)
ATIHDW76.SYS - ADDRESS FFFFF880490E84E BASE AT FFFFF880490A000 DATESTAMP 53A63FF0

I tried again to put in a spare drive and install windows to it and again it just cuts off and restarts. Weird or what.
Never seen this before.
All I can come up with is a faulty mobo

 

[GTP]

I had an issue similar to this on a Toshiba L650.
Drove me nuts for two days!
I discovered that the install media I was using got corrupted somehow.
Grabbed a "vanilla" Windows 7 HP SP1 DVD, installed from that, voila!

 

[frenchscottie]

I had an issue similar to this on a Toshiba L650.
Drove me nuts for two days!
I discovered that the install media I was using got corrupted somehow.
Grabbed a "vanilla" Windows 7 HP SP1 DVD, installed from that, voila!

That wasn't the same problem, I wasn't installing windows as a job I was only doing it as a test as the problem was with the laptop restarting before getting to windows or freezing at the log in.

 

[HFultzjr]

Longshot here.
I see where you booted a Linux CD with sucess.
Maybe try and INSTALL Linux on the hard drive and see how it acts.
Also, is there a "recovery partition" you could recover from.
I know a clean install is best, but just for options.
Weird one for sure.

 

[frenchscottie]

I don't want to start mucking about with his drive. It just restarts before It gets to windows.
There is no recovery partition and he has a lot of programs on it for music production etc and he doesn't want to lose them as it took him quite a while to set it all up and get the various programs to work together.
I'll put a spare drive in his machine and install Linux, but I don't hold up much hope.
I think it'll be another motherboard.

 

[frenchscottie]

I ordered another motherboard and it arrived this morning, connected it up and it is now sitting in windows fine, no freezing or restarting.
So there you have it a faulty motherboard. It's been a first with this problem.
I've been surprised how few members responded.

 

[GTP]

I've been surprised how few members responded.

Just my curiosity, but how many did you expect to respond?

 

[frenchscottie]

Just my curiosity, but how many did you expect to respond?

Not sure, but there's usually more than 4.

 

[NJW]

I've been surprised how few members responded.

You need to post easier problems.

 

[frenchscottie]

You need to post easier problems.

Lol. Easier problems I can usually deal with without help.
It's good to know it wasn't just me that was tearing my hair out - although there's not much their to begin with.