Acer won't wake up

March 5, 2006 9:08 AM

Help. My dad's new Acer Aspire 3002LCi won't wake up. Help.

Situation: I shut the case on the laptop and left it plugged in overnight. When I went to use it this morning, I had a screen with a big Acer logo on it and nothing else. No mouse pointer, no response, zilch. I couldn't turn it off, so I finally pulled the plug and disconnected the battery.
Now, when I try to turn the power on, the HD light flashes for 2 seconds, and the power-light starts flashing constantly and nothing else, it does´t try to boot, give me a bios screen, or anything. The screen is balnk and no other lights are on. I tried connecting an external monitor but it doesn't show anything.
I have tried unplugging it, leaving it off for a while, etc. I think it's in sleep mode (hence the flashing power light), but am not able to make it power up.
Any help is appreciated, as I have my dad's new laptop for the weekend and don't want to tell him it has to go back to the store.

posted by signal to computers & internet (11 comments total)

If you turn the machine off and turn it back on holding down the F2 key, do you see the BIOS screen? I know you said it doesn't give you a BIOS screen, but I'm not clear if that means you tried booting to the BIOS setup via F2 keypress at power-up or whether it just doesn't show it during your boot attempts. Not being able to boot into BIOS is not good, since that's low-level ops for a computer.

Also, if you have anything hanging off the computer: external mouse, flash drive, anything at all, pull it before you try booting as it's one less variable in the equation. This is important if you have an external USB floppy drive, since it's part of the chain of boot devices.
posted by mdevore at 11:45 AM on March 5, 2006

mdevore: tried booting with F2, F8, esc, delete, tab, etc. It doesn't boot at all, just flashes the HD light a few times and then settles into the powerlight blinking state. No screen activity at all. Tried with a bootable CD, no dice.
I disconnected everything, which didn't change anything either.
posted by signal at 11:53 AM on March 5, 2006

The other odd thing is I left the battery and AC plug disconnected for an hour, to see if it would clear the 'sleep' memory, and as soon as I put the battery back in, it did the HD-powerlight thing, without waiting for me to push the power button.
posted by signal at 11:54 AM on March 5, 2006

Unless you can figure a way to reset the CMOS, and the CMOS state is actually the failure point rather than hardware, unfortunately I think you're at the repair stage. I looked at the online manual for your machine, but didn't see listed a means to do a hardware CMOS reset.

How brave are you? I did read about someone resetting a stuck BIOS password for his 5672 Acer by opening the battery compartment on the bottom and shorting across the contacts of the back-up battery, which resets the chip to initial ship state. The 5000 series apparently is related to your 3000 series since the same manual covers both.

Other than that, best I can say is to pull the battery overnight, and try again tomorrow. Don't hold much hope for it, though. Running out of options other than a service visit.
posted by mdevore at 12:21 PM on March 5, 2006

Have you tried plugging it in etc (so you get the flashing light) and then holding down the power button for 10 seconds? This is the softswitch override, and should shut the system down. Then hit the power button again to power it up.
posted by defcom1 at 12:36 PM on March 5, 2006

the blinking is probably not it saying "i'm asleep" but it saying "something's wrong". most recent Dells do this - if there's a problem that manifests itself really early on in the self-checks, the power light will blink and/or the numlock, scroll lock and caps lock lights will give you a code to look up. have you looked on Acer's website/google'd for a troubleshooting guide? or can you try to determine what the code is and post here? (to do that, cut all power, have the laptop open, and plug it into AC and note how all the lights flash.) the downside to this is that the code isn't likely to tell you anything that you can fix unless you've done something like adding memory recently.
posted by mrg at 2:02 PM on March 5, 2006

It seems like hardware failure. The light might blink specifically, so you might be able to determine what the error code is. Unfortunately, it almost certainly has to go back to the store.
posted by insomnus at 2:06 PM on March 5, 2006

mdevore: not very brave, considering it's still under warranty I'd rather not void it.
defcom1: I've tried that, and many other variations, no luck so far. I will give it one last try following your instructions.
Alright, thanks for all the answers, taking it back tomorrow.
posted by signal at 2:23 PM on March 5, 2006

sounds like that's your best option. Good luck!
posted by defcom1 at 3:49 PM on March 5, 2006

I've had the same thing happen to me twice with an Acer, both times the motherboard had to be replaced.
posted by fuzz at 1:17 AM on March 6, 2006

Heard back from the shop, it was the Motherboard, they're shipping one in to replace it.
Thanks, everybody.
posted by signal at 12:42 PM on March 7, 2006