2013 Archives

[donny]

my acer m5-481pt has a corrupted bcd file and won't boot and I don't have a recovery disk. What are my options?

[jomebrew]

Mine too.  

I have a WIndows 8 Bootable flash drive but have to change F2 BIOS Setup to Boot Mode use Legacy BIOS for boot drives to boot from it.  If I use UEFI, it does not list the USB as a boot device.  It only lists Windows Boot Manager.

Trying to recover/repair the BCD is not working so well.  I ran into a problem with Invalid Device use bcdedit.

I can see my drive and ll my file booting from USB but I can't seem to fix the boot from it. 

[jomebrew]

Solved my problem no thanks to Acer support...

Unfortunately, it required a windows 8 ISO or DVD.  

Basically, you need a UEFI boot disk which is pretty east to make if you have a Windows 8 ISO.  Luckily for work I do.

I created a fat32 formatted USB boot disk and copied all the files form the ISO image to the USB drive and then insert it into the M5.  Impediately after powering on the computer I pressed F2 repeatedly.  In setup, I enabled F12 boot menu asn saved. 

While rebooting I repeatedly pressed F12 until the boot menu showed which now listed my USB drive.  I selected the USB and booted.

At the first scrreen you select Repair, then the nest screen Troubleshoot then Command Prompt.

At the command prompt it was simply bootrec /fixboot then bootrec.exe /rebuildsbcd.

Maybe Acer will give you a product ID that can be used to download a windows 8 ISO from microsoft.  I was pretty disappointed with my first ever suppor call with Acer.  Good Luck.