My acer one inspire won't "start"

[AcerDontWork]

Hi,
I have had my computer for a very long time, and all of a sudden it doesn't work.  When i power on, i see "Acer Empowering People", then a white blinking line, and thats it.  What's wrong?

Thanks,
Coty

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

You don't say which Linux distribution you have installed .. is it the defaut "Linpus Lite" ? .. ie. does it look like this:-

I'm afraid that could mean any number of failures ..

From something as simple as the boot device order being wrong in the BIOS

to something slightly more complex such as a file system or OS error

or something as drastic as a hardware failure such as dead/dying SSD or RAM

If you have access to a windows PC and a 2GB+ USB stick, I'd suggest creating a Peppermint 3 LiveUSB and seeing if you can boot to that .. then we can go from there.

You'll find instructions for creating/booting a Peppermint 3 LiveUSB in stage 1 here:
http://linuxforums.org.uk/index.php?topic=10313.msg76514#msg76514

Do NOT move on to stage 2 (installing Peppermint) at this point, just check you can boot to the LiveUSB.