PC boots, gets to lock screen, shuts itself down

[dilettante]

This is an Acer Revo Build M1-601 that has 2GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, Celeron N3050, Intel HD Graphics. These come with Win10 preinstalled.

This has been running fine for about 4 months. All updates are routinely applied, the only added hardware is a fast USB3 Sony 64BG flash drive used for extra storage that is left plugged in. The machine only gets used intermittantly for software testing.

As of yesterday it is no longer usable for any purpose. It will boot and once it gets to the lock screen it shuts itself down within seconds. If I'm quick I can get to the logon screen and enter a few characters of the password, really quick I might even get to the desktop. Then the display goes dark and after 30 seconds or so it powers off.

The only change made yesterday was to reformat the USB flash drive from exFAT to NTFS. However even removing this drive and rebooting changes nothing and the achine worked for 2 months without this drive. The drive had nothing on it aside from scratch files, and little of that even before reformatting. Perhaps just coincidence?


I have done several full resets and reinstalls by booting with Alt-F10. When I get to the end of that process it runs fine... up until I have to go through a restart. This usually occurs because I have uninstalled some crapware, or ignoring that when I change the WiFi network connection from Public to Private or anything else requiring a restart.

I believe I've ruled out a bad power supply, since it will run for hours as long as I never restart or shut down.

I'm resetting once more today in order to try to turn "safe boot" on and try that to look for driver conflicts, etc. I'll probably also try turning off "fast boot" since that seems to be involved in "unexpected shut down" issues others see on other hardware.

Any other suggestions come to mind?

 

[dilettante]

Ok, reset from scratch again. Defined a WiFi connection and left it Public. Turned off Fast Start. Let it sit and run for about 90 minutes. No problem.

Booted into Safe Mode. No problem. No obvious driver conflicts I can see.

Restarted... gets to the logon screen and now the blue "Shutting down" (with spinning circle o' dots) screen. Shuts down. Restarting just repeats this every time.

Resetting and reinstalling Windows again (all of these are from a recovery partition) and leaving Fast Start enabled. Working again. On restart I get the previous faulty behavior back: Gets to lock screen and before a login can complete just blacks out and shuts down after 30 seconds or so.

 

[dilettante]

Hmm, Acer had nothing to suggest. If I had to guess either the Intel SOC or the eMMC chip has failed, but guessing isn't fixing. Seems odd it could run on first boot for so long though. Sounded far more like a software issue.

Oh well, at least they're paying shipping both ways to repair it.