Question Acre laptop shut down while performing disk cloning for SSD. Now laptop won’t turn on, power light blinks blue 5 times. Battery light not on.

[Periwinkle]

I’ve been using my laptop’s hard rive and it slows my Acer Laptop’s performance. The model is Aspire 3 A315-41-R2W5, with Ruben 5 AMD graphics card.

My friend was helping me clone the disk drives into a new SSD card, where the SSD being cloned as an external hard drive. The laptop was plugged in, I wasn’t doing any work while it was in the beginning stages of cloning.

It suddenly shut down with no warning and no error popped on the screen. I thought it fell asleep but when I press the power button, the power light keeps blinking blue 5 times. The battery light is off too.

Is my laptop dead now? What can I do? Other resources say I may have a flat battery (but the laptop was plugged in already while I was working on it) but it happened while I was cloning the hard drive so I haven’t found anything on that.

 

[AlHuneke]

Cloning by itself would not change the system drive. That is the whole idea of cloning--making a copy. You need to search on the internet for Acer "blink codes" and see what the blinks are telling you. Once you know that, let us know and we'll suggest a next step. Don't start messing around inside until you have decode the blinks. One step at a time.

 

[Periwinkle]

Cloning by itself would not change the system drive. That is the whole idea of cloning--making a copy. You need to search on the internet for Acer "blink codes" and see what the blinks are telling you. Once you know that, let us know and we'll suggest a next step. Don't start messing around inside until you have decode the blinks. One step at a time.

Hi AlHuneke,

I mentioned that I’ve already researched what the blink meant. For Acer, it means the battery is flat or dead.

But at the time, my laptop was already plugged in. So there is no way that the battery becomes 0 while it’s cloning.

 

[AlHuneke]

In theory, if the unit is plugged in, a defective battery should not matter. However, it may be that the design of your laptop won't allow a boot with a bad battery (good way to sell more batteries). Unless you can get a definitive answer to that question, it seems your first step is a new battery. However, I have a suspicion that something failed in the hardware that is unrelated to the cloning. Since you can''t start your laptop, that is a bit hard to diagnose.

I recommend you buy an OEM battery if possible. Some of the off-label batteries are flaky.

One other thought--are you sure the power adapter is OK? Hypothetically, if it was bad, the battery would drain but may still retain enough power to indicate the issue. Reread the blink info and see if a discharged battery could cause that blink pattern.

 

[Periwinkle]

In theory, if the unit is plugged in, a defective battery should not matter. However, it may be that the design of your laptop won't allow a boot with a bad battery (good way to sell more batteries). Unless you can get a definitive answer to that question, it seems your first step is a new battery. However, I have a suspicion that something failed in the hardware that is unrelated to the cloning. Since you can''t start your laptop, that is a bit hard to diagnose.

I recommend you buy an OEM battery if possible. Some of the off-label batteries are flaky.

One other thought--are you sure the power adapter is OK? Hypothetically, if it was bad, the battery would drain but may still retain enough power to indicate the issue. Reread the blink info and see if a discharged battery could cause that blink pattern.

Hi it’s been a while! I didn’t get it figured out in time so I had to put it on the side. I think there was a issue with the power adapter as my laptop is functioning normally now.

As for why it shut down while doing something important, my laptop may have just drained the battery inside of charging the entire time. Although it should have a notification ahead of time right?

 

[AlHuneke]

Windows should warn you but it depends on your power settings. I had one machine with a marginal battery that would just quit until I set the warning alarms to much higher values. You might try setting the warning to something like 25%,