Boot loop after failed factory reset

T_Swizzle · August 15, 2021

I have an old Acer laptop, Aspire 5733z-4851, it was a daily driver for my grandparents until they got tablets and has spent the last 5 years in the bottom of a cabinet. They let me have it, I took off all the pictures and important stuff and then went to do a good old windows reset, the hard drive had barely anything on it, a few updates and 3.7 gigs of pictures as said. The reset got to about 35 percent and then it rebooted, I didn't really think anything of it but when it came back the windows loading screen showed up for a few seconds, gave me a message saying that the reset failed and them immediately went into a boot loop. At the moment I'm thinking of buying an ssd to replace the old spinner boy and do a complete fresh install, also this might not make a difference but the OS was updated from Windows 7 to 10, not a clean install, if that is important info. The eventual plan would be to use this computer as a hub for some janky security cameras, I'm thinking full on webcams mounted inside of my windows pointing down the road. As an important note I've never done a fresh install of windows, I'm not a software kind of person, so this is a bit daunting to me but I'm going to bring this poor acer back from the dead. For those curious it has a Pentium, 4 gigs of that sweet sddr3 ram and a 500 gig hard drive. Thanks everyone in advance and stay safe out there

Bombastinator · August 15, 2021

45 minutes ago, T_Swizzle said:

I have an old Acer laptop, Aspire 5733z-4851, it was a daily driver for my grandparents until they got tablets and has spent the last 5 years in the bottom of a cabinet. They let me have it, I took off all the pictures and important stuff and then went to do a good old windows reset, the hard drive had barely anything on it, a few updates and 3.7 gigs of pictures as said. The reset got to about 35 percent and then it rebooted, I didn't really think anything of it but when it came back the windows loading screen showed up for a few seconds, gave me a message saying that the reset failed and them immediately went into a boot loop. At the moment I'm thinking of buying an ssd to replace the old spinner boy and do a complete fresh install, also this might not make a difference but the OS was updated from Windows 7 to 10, not a clean install, if that is important info. The eventual plan would be to use this computer as a hub for some janky security cameras, I'm thinking full on webcams mounted inside of my windows pointing down the road. As an important note I've never done a fresh install of windows, I'm not a software kind of person, so this is a bit daunting to me but I'm going to bring this poor acer back from the dead. For those curious it has a Pentium, 4 gigs of that sweet sddr3 ram and a 500 gig hard drive. Thanks everyone in advance and stay safe out there

Might need a new drive. Something else could have gone though. Old laptops are harder even than old desktops because laptops aren’t ATX. My move (which may very well not be the best one) would be update the firmware to newest FOR THAT VERSION OF THAT DEVICE, air gap it, pull the drive and test it separately. see if it has a cmos battery, if it does, replace it, and see if it will post. If it won’t even post it’s probably parts. If it does post, find the ORIGINAL CDs for that laptop (because it may have custom stuff) and try to boot off those. If that works, update the OS and see if that works. It may not. If it doesn’t it’s not a windows machine anymore but might work as a Linux box. If you can’t even update the bios for the thing, you may just be hosed. Parts again.