Acer AO 532h Won't Reboot

This is (or was) an excellent little notebook. BUT it has recently started to refuse to reboot. I press the power-on key (top left) and it lights up blue. The disk light at the front also turns blue for a second but then goes out. Nothing happens. I have to momentarily unplug the battery to start again - this loses the date an time and other IS data - but still it wont reboot.

I have found a 'solution' of sorts - far from elegant - and this is to press the power-on button and shake the laptop whilst in a vertical position. This seems to cause the hard-drive arm too move slightly enough to read the boot sectors. It then boots up from scratch. I then have to reset the date an time, and restart Chrome etc. The previous session is well lost.

Luckily I have backed up all of the data files, but it seems that the hard-drive is on the way out.

I have created a bootable USB drive for Linux Puppy (free) but this is ignored. Linux Puppy is useful since it runs in RAM only and also allows recovery of data files.

I did do a defrag. on the hard-drive and this went from 19% to 35% - that is it ended up more defragged than it started. This also took about 4 hours and 7 passes.

So the next issue is to replace the hard-drive - but I don't have the original Win 7 Start disks. So it may mean I'll have to install Linus Ubuntu (or some other flavour).

Any ideas please?

 

From what you are saying with regard to having to reset the time, I
would think that the motherboard battery needs replacement.

The motherboard battery only lasts approx five years.

 

Yes - thank you. But the BIOS battery was flat when I bought the notebook. It never retained the date an time!!

The main issue right now is that when I start up the Acer I get a brief blue light at the front - third light from the left - and then nothing. I have found that shaking the whole notebook during the rebooting process that this sometimes causes the hard-drove to read correctly and actually reboot. This all appears to be a fault with the hard-drive.

Luckily when shaking the notebook (should I patent that idea?) and getting it to reboot, I have now managed to copy off all the data files to an external hard-drive. Also using Easy ToDo I have managed to back up the system ready for a re-install with a new drive.

Now I need a SSD 250GB replacement.

What size is the SATA (presumably) 2.5in 250GB hard-drive in the original notebook? Is there an app. that can analyse the system to tell me all the of the hard ware.

Re: a replacement SSD I need the original physical dimensions of the original hard-drive. Also can someone recommend a suitable SSD replacement please? I would avoid ASUS (from Maplin), but Amazon / eBay has Samsung, Kingston, SanDisk at 250GB and 500GB.

Also how easy is it is to remove the old drive and replace it with the new SSD one?

Many thanks.

 

The ssd drive will be a standard 2.5" drive.

Scandisk is a good make.

Use this program to clone your existing drive over to the ssd

https://www.partitionwizard.com/

 

Thank you - I a downloading this now!!