Help! Failed updates to boot error! Acer Aspire V3-551

Andromyde

New Member
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I really hope someone can help me--I have no recovery media, no recovery partition (thanks to gateway) and no idea how it got from what seemed like a normal update to...this.

I'll start from the beginning.
Tonight I went to restart my computer and surprisingly it needed to update though it had installed some a few days ago. I thought little of it and waited. I sat for about half an hour and upon the second time it restarted, it said "we couldn't complete the changes---" etc and stayed on that screen for another half hour. It then restarted. And went to the screen again. I waited 45 mins before holding the power button down to shut it off. Turned it back on, and the screen came up again. So I tried to use f2 to access the boot menu and found it password protected somehow. I'd never seen this before. I looked up how to remove the password and removed the bios battery and replaced it. This fixed that issue. So, now able to get to boot options, I decided I'd enable the f12 recovery menu and try to use startup repair, or system restore. Startup repair failed, system restore said I needed a system image(?) And recovery said the drive Windows is on is locked. I know the previous hd had a Windows recovery partition but ever since gateway replaced it, it does not. So, turning it off and on once more, it now gives a boot error (0x000000f), tells me to insert recovery media, and shuts off and restarts in a loop.

This has gone horribly wrong. There's been no power surge, the he should be physically fine, I removed all power sources and the hd before resetting the bios battery and was careful in replacing everything and I don't see what else could have been done as far as turning off my laptop when it was stuck on reverting the changes from the failed update. I can't afford to pay for recovery media or worse yet having it repaired right now as I have important files on my hard drive that I'd like to recover by not just replacing the hard drive and I need this laptop for my work.


I hope this post is understandable since I'm writing from a phone and I'm half out of my mind with worry--I've been up very late trying to fix this. Can anyone help me?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1
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