Fresh install of Windows will not reboot, it freezes instead. Suspending will trash the install

Solution 1:

The Acer Aspire 5560 has a buggy UEFI implementation, it doesn't like GPT disks. Forcing MBR has resolved this issue. I checked on my coworker's Win7 Pro->Ent image, it is also MBR, thus why it worked.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/82200-35-acer-aspire-5560g-hangs-restart

Solution 2:

I've also had to work on an Acer Aspire 5560 laptop. As said by others, it does not work well with GPT, but works excellent with MBR.

In my case, I installed a brand new SSD and attempted to install Windows 10 64 bit on there using a USB3.0 drive that I prepared with the Windows Media Creation Tool. This did not work, as the USB3.0 drive was nog recognized. There wasn't any option to disable secure boot and the USB3.0 drive did not appear in the list of boot drives.

I then tried the exact same with an USB2.0 drive which was recognized by the system and showed the Windows installation window. I followed the steps until the system had to reboot: it got stuck on rebooting. Hard reset of the laptop and the Windows installation continued. Windows had finally installed succesfully, but upon rebooting (or even shutting the system off) it always got stuck again.

Some research later, I came across this SuperUser post and decided to follow the tips from the TomsHardware forum. Unfortunately, the specific fix mentioned there only works when you install using a Windows 10 CD/DVD installation disk which I did not have.

The solution

What worked for me was to create the bootable USB2.0 stick using a Windows 10 ISO (create one using the Windows Media Creation Tool) using Rufus. The setting that needed to be changed is 'Partition scheme' from GPT to MBR.

After that, I ran the Windows 10 installation on the laptop and when asked 'Where do you want to install Windows' made sure to delete all partitions until there wasn't a partition left, but only 'Disk # (0 probably) Unallocated Space'. Select the disk and continue the installation. Rebooting/shutting down now works properly!