This is a six month old Aspire Es1-131-C4XR, Manu date 2015/05, first ten of serial: NXMYGEF003.
This is the model with only a 32Gb EMMC which is (apparently) a flash drive style memory intergrated on the motherboard it's running on 8.1. According to the owner this has been happening since new.
When the laptop has been left for a while it boots fine in the BIOS - Insydeh20 v5.0 - it shows boot priority order as:
in the information screen the EMMC is seen
Excuse Paint skilzzzz
But then sometimes it decides not to boot, the BIOS info screen cant see the EMMC and the boor order is all wrong.
The first thing I did was update from BIOS 1.17 to the latest available 1.22 - no change. This would normally be treated as a hardware failure, but the fact it's not consistent makes me wonder. Pressing the battery disconnect button underneath doesn't change anything. The fact that the boot priority changes more than I would of thought for nopy seeing the EMMC from having 6 to 7 items?
The first time I saw it was when it had switched off into no EMMC/no boot mode was during an update restart.
Speaking to the owner and from my own experience if you leave the laptop overnight next day it boots fine.
I am assuming trying to repair or reinstall (would a USB flash drive work on the USB HDD option?) windows 8.1 or 10 which I have a USB install for wouldn't change the bios as in desktop PCs or in this little one does the BIOS system store or install differently not using a ROM chip?
Thank you for reading and in anticipation of any replies.