superangrypenguin

Sorry, I missed this until now. Yeah, at this point, contacting Acer would probably be useful. Wow Sorry to hear about all of this.

DenverBrian

No joy for me this weekend with my ThinkPad T440s. I've done everything in this very meticulous list of items and have probably attempted the 30 times that the poster said he had to do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/c...hing_happened/

Update: I tried one more thing - doing a Windows 8.1 "refresh." So, essentially reinstalling 8.1. After that, tried the Windows 10 update directly from the Media Creation Tool...and it worked!

Now to spend the next several days re-tweaking all the settings that Windows 10 put back in default mode. Grrr.

nkedel

Sorta; CMOS is where it stores user configuration. The firmware itself (Legacy BIOS/UEFI/SMBIOS and any other HW-specific stuff) will be in Flash, non-Flash EEPROM, or older types of ROM.

Also, the regular BIOS or UEFI firmware is mostly done running once the OS starts (DOS aside, and that's a long time ago.)

Lastly, have you tried an external keyboard to see if you can interrupt boot with that?

YVR Cockroach

Wouldn't normally even see the boot thing unless you paid close attention, and yes, it did go to Windows boot screen.


I think they must muck around with the BIOS. Has to.

Steps were, I reformatted the partition of the HD that had Win 10 Technical Preview on t as that one bombed real good. Reinstalled Win 8.1 from a USB key. Drive was booting up fine.

Ran the Win 10 UG from the USB key (by running the bacth or exe file). Did a complete drive clean again. UG went to installing Win 10 files and apps, at which is froze and some point (blank _dark_ screen, no keybaord response, no drive lights for minutes). Rebooted, tried to do it again, before saying it was reverting to Win 8.1.

At that point, it became lifeless again. When I tried to reboot, it came up with the problems shown in the video. Some hardware failure is possible but I don't think so.

YVR Cockroach

In my case, the CMOS (assuming that is where the boot order is stored) is non-volatile (maybe a new development but it is a PITA as I can't reset the BIOS settings).

No external KB available but I was going to take the laptop down to a thrift store. Right now in the process of seeing if I can by some miracle reflash the BIOS.

superangrypenguin

Hmm. So just thinking from a technical standpoint, I can't think of any reason Win 10 would much around with the BIOS given your install order and what you did. And also, what did you mean about "complete drive clean again"? Thanks!

superangrypenguin

A very good suggestion.

I know this is super rare, but I think at this point that it's a hardware issue...

YVR Cockroach

Option to format the drive with the Win 10 UG.

superangrypenguin

Oh I see. Hmm, that still doesn't mean that Windows is accessing the BIOS and messing with drive order.

I think this is one of those super rare instances where it's a full moon and that penguins now can actually take flight.


I suspect root cause is....

1) Win 10 was being installed
2) Penguins took flight
3) Hardware now has failed.

The reality is that even with the HDD out the machine it is doing this (based on what I understand with the posts that have been made). At this point, whether or not it is Windows that has caused this, the first item on the repair list to go do is to get the machine to a point where it actually tries to access the HDD..or a bootable USB etc etc

In my opinion, this is a super rare issue. I'd buy a lotto ticket and see if you win. Because that's how lucky (or unlucky) you are....

YVR Cockroach

It could be a hardware failure but answer me this:

Supposing you're installing a new OS onto your machine and it says the machine will reboot several times during such. The BIOS is set to boot from your HD first and not the USB or ODD and your bootable install media is on one of those. How does the install know to go to that device after each install?

superangrypenguin

Hmm. Very salient point. I'm not too sure to be frank. [and I have wondered about this for a few years]

At this point though, it does not appear your machine even successfully POSTs though...

nkedel

The CMOS is always non-volatile, that's the point of the battery. OTOH, yeah, if there's no external battery (whether it's now on flash or similar thing, or there is some non-user-accessible battery embedded in something) that doesn't help... and the latter is, AFAICT, increasingly common.

If you can give it a couple of days, a cheapie is good thing to have around for debugging. Should be able to get something under $10

On UEFI, the Windows installer WILL add the Windows Boot Manager entry at the top of the list. I'm not aware of any standard way for a regular-BIOS install of Windows to muck with the boot order.

Before UEFI, that's why Windows CDs and DVDs had the "press any key to boot from this disc..." prompt.

OTOH, on newer machines the usual way to install from external media with the boot override menu (sometimes F11 or F12, sometimes available only through BIOS setup, depending on the manufacturer.) On one particularly annoying newer machine*, it required booting into UEFI shell and telling it which drive to boot from in a cryptic format.

(* the Intel Compute Stick, which I recommend not buying. For $30 more, and still well under $200, the HP Stream mini-desktop is way more powerful, upgradable, and once you figure on the need for a powered USB hub to plug much of anything into the ICS, it's not even that much smaller.)

Yeah, looks like it.

It looks like some Acers have a recovery mode accessible with Alt-F10. Tried that? It doesn't look like it has a full firmware diagnostics program like many Dell and Lenovo models have, though.

HDQDD

Sounds like you might have a corrupt MBR.

http://forums.techdiscussion.in/show...llation-Solved

superangrypenguin

I was aware of this, but the issue is on a machine that is running BIOS, and not UEFI.

superangrypenguin

If you watch the YouTube video, you will see that neither of those solutions will fix the issue.