Model is Acer Aspire E15 (E5 575G). I will go into detail and history in case its related. What I attempted to do to fix it will be listed in case you wanna skip my shpleel.

This laptop has given me grief for years. I should have known better and copied all my files but I was dumb and didn’t.

It used to do this thing where it would turn off by itself for no reason. I believe that didn’t happen as often/at all when it was plugged in. I figured something might have been loose but was always too nervous to go into the laptop. It also happened in bursts (over the course of a few days or weeks) and then stop for awhile, so I just thought if I bore with it and kept it plugged in until it settled, it would be OK.

I recently stopped using the laptop for awhile. Cannot remember if I charged it fully or not before putting it on hibernate. Decided to use it today and didn’t check if it had any battery left, just charged it to full. Tried to turn it on, and it wouldn’t start. Here’s where I might have messed up? I gave it a smack (I’ve done it before with no issues) and tried to turn it on again. It worked, but stayed on the “Acer” startup screen with the loading dots just going in circles. I turned it off and turned it on again. same thing. I gave it another smack or two and restarted it.

This time, it stayed on the Acer startup screen but no dots. Then it showed me the No bootable device error. Restarting it at this point did nothing no matter how many times I tried.

FIXES I TRIED:

I followed a video by PCMonkey on Youtube and attempted almost everything:

I went into BIOS and changed the time (as it was off by a few hours).

I went into the laptop and FULLY opened it. I removed the RAM and I think the SSD (size was around a stick of gum and was held down by a screw), then plugged it back in. Based on what his Hard-drive (HDD?) looked like and where it was held, I did not have that in my laptop. I also tightened all the screws and tried to look for anything loose or wiggling but it all seemed snug and OK.

I went back into BIOS and changed the Boot from UEFI to legacy but all that did was bring up a screen with a bunch of white text. I tried to go back from legacy to UEFI. I tried to turn OFF secure Boot. I tried to reset to default settings. --> I’ve read somewhere about Boot Priority but I don’t understand. I did notice on the front page of the BIOS, it said “NONE” for 4-5 rows, I believe which had to do with Hard Drive

At some point I started changing random things to see if that would do anything but it didn’t.

Don’t think it’s a CMOS battery problem (if I even have one) as the time remained the same as what I changed it to.

Based on the YT video, it seems it’s either an OS problem or my hard-drive is crapped out? Is there anything else to consider? Any other fixes I can try? I don’t know how to reinstall the OS if the laptop itself is not starting up properly. I would like to avoid having to buy a new hard-drive since I use it so infrequently. If it wasn’t for all the files I had in there, I would just throw it out.

My last hail mary is just letting the battery run out naturally and see if it can figure itself out.