Been using this laptop for a few years, and it had a hard drive failure. A tech savvy friend of mine and I bought a new SSD, unscrewed the back of the laptop (he had an anti-static wristband and everything), and put in the SSD. It took like, 10 minutes and was super easy, though maybe that's just cause he's such a computer whiz. Dunno, not my area of expertise. We re-installed Windows 8, and it rebooted once fine. I turned it off, and when I next went to use it, I hit the power button, the fan spins up super loud, the CD rom drive (empty) clicks twice, and it gets stuck on "Acer - explore beyond limitsTM" . The spinning circle of dots boot thing that used to show loading no longer shows up, and I left it on overnight and nothing happened.
Once it asked for a BIOS password, but I never put a bios password on it.
Pounding F2 or F10 on start up does nothing.
The one caveat is that a screw in the back left corner near the screen fell out, and the hinges and power jack were flexing up against the plastic, and some of the plastic is a bit damaged. My friend said the motherboard might be bent or damaged, but it was more or less running fine before the reset, except being super slow and crashing every once in a while.
Is there anything I can try to get it working?